[ article]

Despite the widespread proliferation of social media in policy and politics, televised election debates are still a prominent form of large-scale public engagement between politicians and the electorate during election campaigns. Advanced visual interfaces can improve these important spaces of democratic engagement. In this paper, we present a user study in which a new hypervideo technology was compared with a publicly available interface for television replay. The results show that hypervideo navigation, coupled with interactive visualisations, improved sensemaking of televised political debates and promoted people’s attitude to challenging personal assumptions. This finding suggests that hypervideo interfaces can play a substantial role in supporting citizens in the complex sensemaking process of informing their political choices during an election campaign, and can be used as instruments to promote critical thinking and political opinion shifting.

[ article]

Nudges are increasingly adopted by governments to promote social welfare, but there is an open debate on the ethics of nudges and their application in highly contested domains. We present a tool for nudging citizens? democratic engagement with political election debates. Democratic Reflection is a moment-by-moment second screen interaction technology for capturing audience feedback to time-based stimuli like speeches, TV debates, or video replays. While viewing the stimuli, users select from a matrix of icons, each describing a reflective nudge and instant audience reaction. Initial insights from the applications of this technology in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 UK elections, suggest that the reflective nudges enabled by Democratic Reflection can promote active engagement with politics, and may increase the willingness of people to be involved in political processes in the future.

[ article]

The PEOPLES (Private Expression of Polarisation Leveraged to Expand Sociability) project envisages a fine grained, language-independent measure of affective polarisation between participants in two-party chats over controversial topics. The ultimate goal of the project is to channel the analytical power of the measure to enable automated real-time interventions, nudging participants towards healthier conversational behaviours. We hypothesise that this measure can be derived solely from the unique profiles of each conversational participant’s private reactions (akin to emoji responses on mainstream social media) to the messages they receive in two-party chats. Aided by the language-independence of the approach, we intend to base and evaluate the measure on empirical evidence, by studying polarised users from several cultural contexts, both Western and non-Western.

[ article]

Public deliberations are organised by governments and other large institutions to take the views of citizens around controversial issues. Increasing public demand and the associated burden on public funding make the quality of public deliberation events and their outcomes critical to modern democracies. This paper focuses on technology developed around streams of computational argument data intended to inform and improve deliberative communication in real time. Combining state-of the-art speech recognition, argument mining, and analytics, we produce dynamic, interactive visualisations intended for nonexperts, deployed incrementally in real time to deliberation participants via large screens, hand-held and personal computing devices. The goal is to bridge the gap between theoretical criteria on deliberation quality from the political sciences and objective analytics calculated automatically from computable argument data in actual public deliberations, presented as a set of visualisations which work on stream data and are simple, yet informative enough to make a positive impact on deliberative outcomes.

[ proceedings]

The paper proposes a new complex method of corpus creation under the constraint of bounded, short period of time available for the annotation process. One important consequence of such a constraint is that it does not leave time for the traditional techniques of corpus evaluation of Inter-Annotator Agreement, IAA. Therefore, we designed, tested and improved a multi-layer annotation process with each subsequent layer aiming to replace IAA with an alternative method allowing for the creation of high-quality corpus.
We built our method on two approaches to corpus creation: iterative enhancement (IE) which aims to improve the annotation in several iterations using automatic techniques to look for inconsistencies in the manual annotation, and agile corpus creation (ACC) which replaces the traditional, linear-phase approach with a cyclic and iterative small-step process. The layers in our approach can be viewed as such iterative cycles which aim to improve the result of the annotation, however, our process is also adapted to handle time-constraint and the annotation of complex linguistic phenomena (dialogical argumentation) where (semi-)automatic methods such as IE cannot be successfully applied. Moreover, the full multi-layer annotation process was iterated three times which allowed us to not only improve the corpus as in ACC, but also to improve the annotation process itself.

[ article]

We demonstrate the first prototype of the ADD-up visual analytics system. The Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up) project aims to enhance public deliberations by providing argument analytics in real time. The system will ultimately take a stenographic feed of a public deliberation meeting, automatically extract the arguments therein and project visual analytics intended to improve the deliberative quality of the event.

[ article]

In this paper we argue for incorporating a class of meaning in computational argumentation that has not been previously exploited in the area, namely conventional implicatures (CIs). Due to their representation on the linguistic surface, they are easier to exploit for computational purposes than the better-known conversational implicatures. By incorporating CIs in Inference Anchoring Theory, we equip a framework for handling dialogical argumentation with the means to expose a particular type of enthymematic structure, making it amenable for computational argumentation.

[ article]

Participants in a deliberative discourse are expected to follow specific rules of communication to legitimise outcomes. This paper focuses on technology developed around streams of computational argument data which is intended to inform and improve deliberative communication in real time. The goal is to bridge the gap between long-established theoretical desiderata from the social science literature and objective analytics calculated automatically from computable argument data in actual public deliberations.

[ article]

Radio and television programmes, which broadcast discussions on societally important topics such as immigration or nuclear disarmament, are essential sources of information about different views on these topics which the general public can use to help form their opinions. This paper proposes Argument Analytics, sense-making argument technology, developed and deployed to provide an insight into such debates for a large audience by visualising metrics such as likemindedness (similarity or differences in views of individual participants of the debate) and divisive issues (issues attracting the highest number of supports and attacks).

[ article]

This paper presents an online platform for enhancing televised election debates with interactive visualisations. Election debates are one of the highlights of election campaigns worldwide. They are also often criticised as appearing scripted, rehearsed, detached from much of the electorate, and at times too complex. Democratic Replay enhances videos of election debates with a collection of interactive tools aimed at providing a replay experience centred around citizens’ needs. We present the system requirements, design and implementation, and report on an evaluation based on the ITV Leaders’ Debate from the 2015 UK General Election campaign.

[ article]

Despite a steep increase in the use of the Internet and handheld computing devices for media consumption, television is still of critical importance for democratic citizenship. Television continues to be the leading source of political information and its relevance has been recognised at policy level. In addition, television keeps evolving technologically and in how it is experienced by viewers. Nonetheless, the ways researchers have measured audience engagement with televised political events in real-time is often limited to small samples of viewers and is based upon a narrow range of responses.

In this paper we look at the audience of televised election debates, and propose a new method to gauge the richness and variety of citizens’ real-time responses at scale by capturing nuanced, non-intrusive, simple and measurable audience feedback. We report on a paper prototype experiment, in which we used a set of flashcards to test the method in an actual televised election debate scenario. We demonstrate how the method can improve our understanding of viewer responses to the debaters’ performances, to the contents in their arguments, and to the debate as media event. We conclude with design guidelines to implement the method on a mass scale in order to measure audience engagement with televised election debates in distributed contexts through audience feedback web and mobile applications.

[ article]

This paper introduces a novel method for measuring non-cooperation in dialogue. The key idea is that linguistic non-cooperation can be measured in terms of the extent to which dialogue participants deviate from conventions regarding the proper introduction and discharging of conversational obligations (e.g., the obligation to respond to a question). Previous work on non-cooperation has focused mainly on non-linguistic task-related non-cooperation or modelled non-cooperation in terms of special rules describing non-cooperative behaviours. In contrast, we start from rules for normal/correct dialogue behaviour – i.e., a dialogue game – which in principle can be derived from a corpus of cooperative dialogues, and provide a quantitative measure for the degree to which participants comply with these rules. We evaluated the model on a corpus of political interviews, with encouraging results. The model predicts accurately the degree of cooperation for one of the two dialogue game roles (interviewer) and also the relative cooperation for both roles (i.e., which interlocutor in the conversation was most cooperative). Being able to measure cooperation has applications in many areas from the analysis – manual, semi and fully automatic – of natural language interactions to human-like virtual personal assistants, tutoring agents, sophisticated dialogue systems, and role-playing virtual humans.

[ article]

In this paper we tackle the crisis of political trust and public engagement with politics by investigating new methods and tools to watch and take part in televised political debates. The paper presents relevant research at the intersection of citizenship, technologies and government/democracy, and describes the motivation, requirements and design of Democratic Replay, an online interactive video replay platform that offers a persistent, customisable digital space for: (a) members of the public to express their views as they watch online videos of political events; and (b) enabling for a richer collective understanding of what goes on in these complex media events.

[ thesis ]

A common assumption in the study of conversation is that participants fully cooperate in order to maximise the effectiveness of the exchange and ensure communication flow. This assumption persists even in situations in which the private goals of the participants are at odds: they may act strategically pursuing their agendas, but will still adhere to a number of linguistic norms or conventions which are implicitly accepted by a community of language users.

However, in naturally occurring dialogue participants often depart from such norms, for instance, by asking inappropriate questions, by avoiding to provide adequate answers or by volunteering information that is not relevant to the conversation. These are examples of what we call linguistic non-cooperation.

This thesis presents a systematic investigation of linguistic non-cooperation in dialogue. Given a specific activity, in a specific cultural context and time, the method proceeds by making explicit which linguistic behaviours are appropriate. This results in a set of rules: the global dialogue game. Non-cooperation is then measured as instances in which the actions of the participants are not in accordance with these rules. The dialogue game is formally defined in terms of discourse obligations. These are actions that participants are expected to perform at a given point in the dialogue based on the dialogue history. In this context, non-cooperation amounts to participants failing to act according to their obligations.

We propose a general definition of linguistic non-cooperation and give a specific instance for political interview dialogues. Based on the latter, we present an empirical method which involves a coding scheme for the manual annotation of interview transcripts. The degree to which each participant cooperates is automatically determined by contrasting the annotated transcripts with the rules in the dialogue game for political interviews. The approach is evaluated on a corpus of broadcast political interviews and tested for correlation with human judgement on the same corpus.

Further, we describe a model of conversational agents that incorporates the concepts and mechanisms above as part of their dialogue manager. This allows for the generation of conversations in which the agents exhibit varying degrees of cooperation by controlling how often they favour their private goals instead of discharging their discourse obligations.

[ article ]

This paper describes tool support that has been implemented for the Test Template Framework (TTF). The TTF is a model-based testing (MBT) method that is especially well suited for unit testing from Z specifications. Although the TTF is a sound MBT method and it has been widely referenced since its first publication, attention in recent years has decayed. In fact, some have argued that generating abstract test cases following the TTF is a manual task requiring its users to perform complex predicate manipulations. This paper shows that these observations are dubious by describing Fastest, a tool that implements solutions for all these issues and, according to many experiments, produces abstract test cases for more than 80% of the satisfiable test specifications. Furthermore, it is claimed that Fastest fulfils the needs of the Z user community regarding MBT tools, which is supported with a range of case studies.

[ pdf | poster ]

We describe ongoing research towards modelling dialogue management for conversational agents that can exhibit and cope with non-cooperative behaviour. Empirical studies of conventional dialogue behaviour in the domain of political interviews and a coarse-grained notion of conversational games are used to characterise non-cooperation. We propose an agent architecture that combines conversational games and discourse obligations, and suggest an implementation.

@InProceedings{pluss:SemDial-2011:b,
  author= "Brian Pl{\"u}ss and Paul Piwek and Richard Power",
  title = "Modelling Non-Cooperative Dialogue: the Role of  Conversational 
      Games and Discourse Obligations",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of SemDial 2011, the 15th Workshop on the 
      Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue",
  location = "Los Angeles, California",
  numpages = "2",
  year = "2011",
  month = sep
}

[ pdf | slides]

This paper reports on an ongoing effort to enable the rapid development of multi-party virtual human negotiation scenarios. We present a case study in which a new scenario supporting negotiation between two human role players and two virtual humans was developed over a period of 12 weeks. We discuss the methodology and development process that were employed, from storyline design through role play and iterative development of the virtual humans’ semantic and task representations and natural language processing capabilities. We analyze the effort, expertise, and time required for each development step, and discuss opportunities to further streamline the development process.

@InProceedings{pluss:SemDial-2011:a,
  author= "Brian Pl{\"u}ss and David DeVault and David Traum",
  title = "Toward Rapid Development of Multi-Party Virtual Human 
      Negotiation Scenarios",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of SemDial 2011, the 15th Workshop on the 
      Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue",
  location = "Los Angeles, California",
  numpages = "10",
  year = "2011",
  month = sep
}

[ pdf]

We have applied Fastest, an implementation of the Test Template Framework, to five real case studies of aerospace software. This involved the formalization in the Z notation of nontrivial parts of each system. One of these models, for instance, formalizes a significant portion of the ECSS-E-70-41A aerospace standard. The models were then fed into Fastest, which automatically generated detailed functional abstract test cases. Since these test cases are independent of any implementation, they can be used to test any of them. Furthermore, we were able to semi-automatically translate them into English so they can be used by domain experts performing independent validation and verification activities.

@InProceedings{cristia:SEW34-2010,
  author= "Maximiliano Cristi{\'a} and Pablo Albertengo and Claudia 
      Frydman and Brian Pl{\"u}ss and Pablo Rodr{\'i}guez Monetti",
  title = "Applying the Test Template Framework to Aerospace Software",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 34th IEEE Annual Software 
      Engineering Workshop",
  series = "SEW 2011",
  location = "Limerick, Ireland",
  numpages = "10",
  year = "2011",
  month = jun,
  organization = "IEEE"
}

[ pdf | slides | poster ]

This paper presents ongoing research on computational models for non-cooperative dialogue. We start by analysing different levels of cooperation in conversation. Then, inspired by findings from an empirical study, we propose a technique for measuring non-cooperation in political interviews. Finally, we describe a research programme towards obtaining a suitable model and discuss previous accounts for conflictive dialogue, identifying the differences with our work.

@InProceedings{pluss:ACLSRW-2010,
  author= "Brian Pl{\"u}ss",
  title = "Non-cooperation in dialogue",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Student Research Workshop",
  series = "ACL-SRW 2010",
  location = "Uppsala, Sweden",
  pages = "1--6",
  numpages = "6",
  year = "2010",
  month = jul,
  organization = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  address = "Stroudsburg, PA, USA"
}

[ pdf | teaser | poster ]

Critical software most often requires an independent validation and verification (IVV). IVV is usually performed by domain experts, who are not familiar with specific, many times formal, development technologies. In addition, model-based testing (MBT) is a promising testing technique for the verification of critical software. Test cases generated by MBT tools are logical descriptions. The problem is, then, to provide natural language (NL) descriptions of these test cases, making them accessible to domain experts. In this paper, we present ongoing research aimed at finding a suitable method for generating NL descriptions from test cases in a formal specification language. A first prototype has been developed and applied to a real-world project in the aerospace sector.

@InProceedings{cristia:pluss:INLG-2010,
  author= "Maximiliano Cristi{\'a} and Brian Pl{\"u}ss",
  title = "Generating natural language descriptions of Z test cases",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language 
      Generation Conference",
  series = "INLG 2010",
  location = "Dublin, Ireland",
  pages = "173--177",
  numpages = "5",
  year = "2010",
  month = jul,
  organization = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  address = "Stroudsburg, PA, USA"
}

[ pdf ]

Most work in linguistics has approached dialogue on the assumption that participants share a common goal and cooperate to achieve it by means of conversation. In computational linguistics this assumption is even stronger. For instance, most dialogue systems rely on the interlocutor’s full coopera- tion to model interaction. The research described here is aimed at the other cases, at those escaping the norms. Failure to cooperate can happen for many reasons. A non-native speaker trying to engage in a complex discussion might provide contribu- tions which are not as clear and precise as would be expected. A student not quite sure about the topic he is supposed to elaborate on in an oral exami- nation might provide information which is not entirely truthful or relevant. Someone suffering from dementia might produce utterances which are irrelevant or uninformative for the current exchange. These examples have to do with incompetence, ignorance and irrationality, all of which lie outside the scope of our study. We will focus on situations in which non-cooperative conversational behaviour is rational, competent and well-informed. This report is part of the first-year probation assessment for a full-time Ph.D. programme. It provides details about the proposed research question, a review of the relevant literature, the proposed research methodology and a work plan.

@TechReport{pluss:TR-2009,
  author= "Brian Pl{\"u}ss",
  title = "Towards a Computational Pragmatics for Non-Cooperative Dialogue",
  number = {2009/13},
  year = "2009",
  month = jul,
  day = "21"
  url = {http://computing-reports.open.ac.uk/2009/TR2009-13.pdf},
  type = {PhD Probation Report}
}

[ pdf | slides (in Spanish) ]

Program verification refers to proving formally that a program is correct with respect to its specification. It is assumed almost universally that the work required for these proofs is so complex, time consuming and expensive that it can not be done but for the most critical parts of a software system.
Invariant Based Programming (IBP) comes to fill the gap between programming and verification. While other approaches to verification are based on a usually large number of complex rules that make them unnatural and unappealing resulting in low popularity, IBP proposes a natural way of obtaining software which is correct by construction.
Procedures constitute a natural extension once a formalism has been defined for the most basic programming constructs. They provide access to abstraction, giving any programming method increased power to deal with more complex programs and algorithms. Procedures also serve as the starting layer, upon which higher constructs can be defined (e.g. classes, data modules, and so forth) and allow (mutual) recursion and exception handling.
However, most proof rules for procedure calls in the literature contain considerable complexity in order to handle parameter binding, different parameter passing conventions and recursion. This makes verification in the presence of procedures difficult in practice.
In this work, we present a practical method for reasoning about mutually recursive procedures with multiple exits in a visual formalism. Based on the refinement calculus, we model procedure calls as multi-exit statements and parameter binding as assignments to fresh variables in an extended state space. We apply the method to a case study; a set of procedures for string manipulation, and suggest how it could be implemented in the SOCOS research tool.

@mastersthesis{pluss:masters-2008,
  author= "Brian Pl{\"u}ss",
  title = "A Practical Method for Reasoning About Procedures in Invariant 
      Based Programming",
  school = "Universidad Nacional de Rosario",
  number = {2009/13},
  year = "2008", 
  month = sep,
  address = "Argentina"
}

[ pdf | short | slides | poster ] (all in Spanish)

Este trabajo presenta un propuesta novedosa para la detección y corrección de errores ortográficos basada en la automatización de las reglas que rigen la ortografía de la lengua castellana. Para ello, se analiza un subconjunto de las reglas tal como aparecen en la literatura
y se introducen los conceptos lingüísticos a los cuales las reglas hacen referencia. Se describen brevemente las técnicas computacionales existentes para el procesamiento de lenguajes naturales, explicando cómo éstas pueden ser utilizadas en la tarea de determinar si una palabra viola alguna de las reglas establecidas y corregir el error. La factibilidad de la propuesta es apoyada con la implementación de un prototipo escrito en Prolog y su utilidad expuesta con algunos ejemplos ilustrativos.

@InProceedings{pluss:pomponio:EST-2008,
  author= "Brian Pl{\"u}ss and Laura Pomponio",
  title = "Automating Spelling Rules for Detection and Correction of 
      Errors in Spanish",
  booktitle = "EST 2008 at the 37th Argentine Conference on Informatics 
      and Operations Research",
  year = "2008",
  month = sep,
  address = "Santa Fe, Argentina"
}