Dr. Adam Zachary Wyner
Researcher in Computer Science and Linguistics

Academic Affiliation
Department of Computer Science
University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom

Contact
51 Lordship Park, Apt. 2
Stoke Newington, N16 5UN, United Kingdom
Tel: +44-(0)20-8809-3960
Email: adam@wyner.info

My research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning language, logic, law, and software develoment. Below, please find my CV along with comments about each research area, starting from more recent work. If you are interested in obtaining any of my publications, please contact me. The website is under revision, and I intend to make publications available online in the near future.

Curriculum Vitae

My current research focuses on natural language engineering of argumentation, which is about designing and developing materials and software tools to support users in formulating and evaluating arguments which are expressed in natural language. Basically, users could conduct virtual debates in natural language arguments about a discussion topic such as waste management (or other policy or legal issues). The system would parse the input sentences, provide semantic translations, use ontologies, calculate the semantic relationships between statements already in the debate, and evaluate results. To carry out the project requires development of a range of resources and technologies: a corpus of arguments, application of computational linguistic text-mining and machine learning techniques, ontologies, controlled languages with a predictive editor, determination of argument relationships, and argumentation frameworks.

In 2006-2008, I was a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, working with Trevor Bench-Capon and Katie Atkinson on the Estrella Project. The focus of the project was legal informatics for public administration and was funded by the European Union. At Liverpool, our interests were primarily in computational argumentation, knowledge representation in argumentation frameworks, legal case-based reasoning, and ontologies for the law. For publications, see links at: Estrella Research at Liverpool.

In 2008, I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from King's College London, UK, where my research focussed on computational jurisprudence, an interdisciplinary subject which draws together elements from Logic, Jurisprudence, Computational Semantics, Multi-Agent Systems, Social and Organizational Theory, and Linguistics. I focussed on the analysis and representation of the fundamental contractual notions of an agent's obligations, permissions, and prohibitions on abstract complex actions, where actions are state-transition functions similar to those in Dynamic Logic. Professor Tom Maibaum was the supervisor, and the Ph.D. was funded by Hewlett-Packard Research Labs, Bristol, UK. The thesis can be downloaded here: Wyner Ph.D. Thesis 2008

In 1994, I received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University, USA, where the subject was the syntax and semantics of adverbial modification. Until 2001, I was a lecturer in Linguistics.