MARRO , Santiago

The automated analysis of argumentation has garnered significant interest in recent years, as computational methods stand to enhance discourse quality across domains. This is especially pertinent in complex fields like healthcare, where sound reasoning bears direct impacts on human lives. The work presented in this thesis advances the...

Argumentation is used by people both internally, by evaluating arguments and counterarguments to make a decision, and externally, e.g., by exchanging arguments to reach an agreement or to promote a position. A major component of the argumentation process concerns the assessment of a set of arguments and of their conclusions in order to...

Argumentation is used by people both internally, by evaluating arguments and counterarguments to make sense of a situation and take a decision, and externally, e.g., in a debate, by exchanging arguments to reach an agreement or to promote an individual position. In this context, the assessment of the quality of the arguments is of extreme...

Background: A huge amount of research is carried out nowadays in Artificial Intelligence to propose automated ways to analyse medical data with the aim to support doctors in delivering medical diagnoses. However, a main issue of these approaches is the lack of transparency and interpretability of the achieved results, making it hard to employ...

The automatic generation of explanations to improve the transparency of machine predictions is a major challenge in Artificial Intelligence. Such explanations may also be effectively applied to other decision making processes where it is crucial to improve critical thinking in human beings. An example of that consists in the clinical cases...

The importance of explanations in decision-making, particularly in the medical domain, has been widely recognized. However, the evaluation of the quality of these explanations remains a challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel approach for assessing and evaluating the reasons provided in explanations about clinical cases. Our approach...

In the latest years, the healthcare domain has seen an increasing interest in the definition of intelligent systems to support clinicians in their everyday tasks and activities. Among others, also the field of Evidence-Based Medicine is impacted by this twist, with the aim to combine the reasoning frameworks proposed thus far in the field with...

In the last years, several empirical approaches have been proposed to tackle argument mining tasks, e.g., argument classification, relation prediction, argument synthesis. These approaches rely more and more on language models (e.g., BERT) to boost their performance. However, these language models require a lot of training data, and size is...

Evidence-based medicine aims at making decisions about the care of individual patients based on the explicit use of the best available evidence in the patient clinical history and the medical literature results. Argumentation represents a natural way of addressing this task by (i) identifying evidence and claims in text, and (ii) reasoning upon...

We show that the structure of communities in social me- dia provides robust information for weakly supervised approaches to assign stances to tweets. Using as seed the SemEval 2016 Stance Detection Task annotated data, we retrieved a high number of topically related tweets. We then propagated information from the manually an- notated seed to...

In this paper we adapt the semi-supervised deep learning architecture known as "Convolutional Ladder Networks", from the domain of computer vision, and explore how well it works for a semi-supervised Named Entity Recognition and Classification task with legal data. The idea of exploring a semi-supervised technique is to assess the impact of...