PhD Thesis

• the project will fund two PhD thesis, both starting in September 2023

Postdoc

• the project will fund a postdoctoral researcher

Master Internship Proposals

• Title: Exploring the nuances of voting in online argumentation debate systems
  Supervisors: Jérôme Delobelle, Sébastien Konieczny, Srdjan Vesic
  Institution: CRIL, Université d'Artois, Lens
  
  Description: As online argumentation systems become increasingly prevalent, the volume of arguments and options within these systems continues to grow. This presents a significant challenge for human analysts, who struggle to manually track changes, understand the various arguments and their relationships, and make sense of the vast amount of information. To address this challenge, our project proposes to use artificial intelligence and argumentation theory to study these systems. Specifically, we will focus on the problem of votes on arguments, which can be either positive or negative. Currently, there is no approach in the literature that can handle votes in an elaborated way. The existing proposal is to calculate the ratio of positive and negative votes and use this as a single number. Our goal is to explore more ways to take into account the votes and understand the nuances of the voting process. One important question that must be addressed is the interpretation of votes. Does voting for an argument mean that the person agrees with the argument's existence, its formal correctness, its hypothesis or conclusion, wants to believe that the argument is true, or simply wants others to believe it is true? The goal of this master thesis will be to determine if these different possible interpretations have to change the way the votes are taken into account in the analysis.