Out there on the web, at any given moment, there are people debating everything from the American presidential election to which seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were best (I'm in the latter camp). Analysing some of these conversations may prove useful, according to researchers at Bielefeld University in Germany.

Starting in 2017, a new research programme called Ratio will begin to track and analyse what people think and say online about certain topics.

Using the example of the refugee crisis and, in particular, the closing of the Balkan route, these researchers aim to track an argument across the web and gauge its level of support as well as finding opposing arguments.

This might sound a little familiar: plenty of projects examine social media for how many people are talking about something (metrics) or how they feel about it (sentiment).

The search engine, however, will draw on the fields of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, computer science and linguistics with the more complex aim of making sense of how arguments are structured and knowledge is represented.

[ http://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/uninews/entry/a_search_engine_for_argumentsOpens in new window ]