In the late 1990s, AI witnessed an increasing use of the term 'argumentation' within its bounds: in natural language processing, in user interface design, in logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning, in Al's interface with the legal community, and in the newly emerging field of multi-agent systems. It seemed to me that many of these uses of argumentation were inspired by (of ten inspired) guesswork, and that a great majority of the AI community were unaware that there was a maturing, rich field of research in Argumentation Theory (and Critical Thinking and Informal Logic) that had been steadily re building a scholarly approach to the area over the previous twenty years or so. Argumentation Theory, on its side; was developing theories and approaches that many in the field felt could have a role more widely in research and soci ety, but were for the most part unaware that AI was one of the best candidates for such application.

The investigation of computational models of argument is a rich and fascinating interdisciplinary research field with two ultimate aims: the theoretical goal of understanding argumentation as a cognitive phenomenon by modeling it in computer programs, and the practical goal of supporting the development of computer-based systems able to engage in argumentation-related activities with human users or among themselves. The biennial International Conferences on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA) provide a dedicated forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest advancements in the field, and cover both basic research and innovative applications. This book presents the proceedings of COMMA 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, COMMA 2020 was held as an online event on the originally scheduled dates of 8 -11 September 2020, organised by the University of Perugia, Italy. The book includes 28 full papers and 13 short papers selected from a total of 78 submissions, the abstracts of 3 invited talks and 13 demonstration abstracts. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is reflected, and contributions cover both theory and practice. Theoretical contributions include new formal models, the study of formal or computational properties of models, designs for implemented systems and experimental research. Practical papers include applications to medicine, law and criminal investigation, chatbots and online product reviews. The argument-mining trend from previous COMMA’s is continued, while an emerging trend this year is the use of argumentation for explainable AI. The book provided an overview of the latest work on computational models of argument, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

This two-volume set LNCS 12656 and 12657 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 43rd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2021, held virtually in March/April 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 50 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 39 short papers, 15 demonstration papers, 12 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 5 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 8 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 436 submissions. The accepted contributions cover the state of the art in IR: deep learning-based information retrieval techniques, use of entities and knowledge graphs, recommender systems, retrieval methods, information extraction, question answering, topic and prediction models, multimedia retrieval, and much more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2022, held in Bologna, Italy in September 2022. The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 7 full papers presented together with 3 short papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. This year, the contributions addressed the following challenges: authorship attribution, fake news detection and news tracking, noise-detection in automatically transferred relevance judgments, impact of online education on children’s conversational search behavior, analysis of multi-modal social media content, knowledge graphs for sensitivity identification, a fusion of deep learning and logic rules for sentiment analysis, medical concept normalization and domain-specific information extraction. In addition to this, the volume presents 7 “best of the labs” papers which were reviewed as full paper submissions with the same review criteria. 14 lab overview papers were accepted and represent scientific challenges based on new datasets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access.

This two-volume set LNCS 13185 and 13186 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 44th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2022, held in April 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 35 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 13 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 12 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 4 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 395 submissions. Chapters “Leveraging Customer Reviews for E-commerce Query Generation” and “End to End Neural Retrieval for Patent Prior Art Search” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This volume presents a snapshot of the current state of the art of research in English corpus linguistics. It contains selected papers from the 40th ICAME conference in 2019 and features contributions from experts in synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive linguistics, as well as in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, and learner language. The volume showcases the particular strengths of research in the ICAME tradition. The papers in this volume offer new insights from the reanalysis of new data types, methodological refinements and advancements of quantitative analysis, and from taking new perspectives on ongoing debates in their respective fields.

The three-volume set LNCS 13980, 13981 and 13982 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 45th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2023, held in Dublin, Ireland, during April 2-6, 2023. The 65 full papers, 41 short papers, 19 demonstration papers, 12 reproducibility papers consortium papers, 7 tutorial papers, and 10 doctorial consortium papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 489 submissions. The book also contains, 8 workshop summaries and 13 CLEF Lab descriptions. The accepted papers cover the state of the art in information retrieval focusing on user aspects, system and foundational aspects, machine learning, applications, evaluation, new social and technical challenges, and other topics of direct or indirect relevance to search.

This double volume book set constitutes the refereed proceedings of 4th International Conference, AI-HCI 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, which was held virtually in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The first volume focuses on topics related to Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, explainability, transparency and trustworthiness, ethics and fairness, as well as AI-supported user experience design. The second volume focuses on topics related to AI for language, text, and speech-related tasks, human-AI collaboration, AI for decision-support and perception analysis, and innovations in AI-enabled systems.

This book provides an overview of computer techniques and tools — especially from artificial intelligence (AI) — for handling legal evidence, police intelligence, crime analysis or detection, and forensic testing, with a sustained discussion of methods for the modelling of reasoning and forming an opinion about the evidence, methods for the modelling of argumentation, and computational approaches to dealing with legal, or any, narratives. By the 2000s, the modelling of reasoning on legal evidence has emerged as a significant area within the well-established field of AI & Law. An overview such as this one has never been attempted before. It offers a panoramic view of topics, techniques and tools. It is more than a survey, as topic after topic, the reader can get a closer view of approaches and techniques. One aim is to introduce practitioners of AI to the modelling legal evidence. Another aim is to introduce legal professionals, as well as the more technically oriented among law enforcement professionals, or researchers in police science, to information technology resources from which their own respective field stands to benefit. Computer scientists must not blunder into design choices resulting in tools objectionable for legal professionals, so it is important to be aware of ongoing controversies. A survey is provided of argumentation tools or methods for reasoning about the evidence. Another class of tools considered here is intended to assist in organisational aspects of managing of the evidence. Moreover, tools appropriate for crime detection, intelligence, and investigation include tools based on link analysis and data mining. Concepts and techniques are introduced, along with case studies. So are areas in the forensic sciences. Special chapters are devoted to VIRTOPSY (a procedure for legal medicine) and FLINTS (a tool for the police). This is both an introductory book (possibly a textbook), and a reference for specialists from various quarters.