Deliberation4Good workshop - supported by the Language Sciences Workshop Fund

Human societies have evolved a variety of successful structures for communication and negotiation between individuals with diverse or conflicting viewpoints. These range from manners governing polite conversation, to laws around jury trials, procedures for formal debates, academic peer review, and even the processes of democratic elections. The development of new digital technologies in the space of social media, natural language processing and machine learning is accelerating the disruption of these old forms of communication. At the same time, it also creates platforms for new possibilities.

Research into decision-making has shown that groups collaborating on a problem can, in the right conditions, outperform even the most knowledgeable of individual group members. The exchange of arguments has been shown to be key to this. Technologies which support better argument production, exchange and comprehension have great potential both in understanding how we can make better decisions, and in enhancing personal, educational and workplace environments where argument exchange can boost productivity and wellbeing.

The first edition of the Deliberation4Good workshop will bring together experts in existing and emerging technologies of argumentative communication, to explore how the old can inform the new and how the new can augment the old. We are gathering people from psychology, social, political and computer science to provide a platform for them to collaborate and share their research, towards answering the moonshot question: “How can people with diverging views be supported to successfully communicate and negotiate?”

Call for Participation

We are preparing a rich programme with invited talks, demos, and paper presentations. If your work is related to how people with diverging views successfully communicate and collaborate please reach out to us with a talk proposal.

Registration to participate and/or present is free for the full day of the workshop. Please register here by the 28th of September: https://forms.gle/GyHzreJ5Wj32GF986

If you’d like to present a talk or have any other questions, please reach out to gmk34@cam.ac.uk or to any of the organisers!

Programme

Invited Speakers

Sacha Altay, University of Oxford, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Mevan Babakar, Google, News and Information Credibility Lead

Shauna Concannon, University of Durham

Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Bath, Department of Computer Science

Jon Roozenbeek, University of Cambridge, Department of Psychology

Organisers

Georgi Karadzhov, University of Cambridge

Andreas Vlachos, University of Cambridge

Tom Stafford, University of Sheffield

Christine De Kock, University of Cambridge

Youmna Farag, University of Cambridge

Supported by

Cambridge Language Sciences Incubator Fund

Cambridge Language Sciences Workshop Fund

Opening Up Minds: engaging dialogue generated from argument maps

READ MORE about Deliberation4Good and the DEliBot project