• Digitalisation is rapidly transforming our societies, transforming the dynamics of our interactions, transforming the culture of our debates. Trust plays a critical role in establishing intellectual humility and interpersonal civility in argumentation and discourse: without it, credibility is doomed, reputation is endangered, cooperation is compromised. The major threats associated with digitalisation – hate speech and fake news – are violations of the basic condition for trusting and being trustworthy which are key for constructive, reasonable and responsible communication as well as for the collaborative and ethical organisation of societies. These behaviours eventually lead to polarisation, when users repeatedly attack each other in highly emotional terms, focusing on what divides people, not what unites them.

  Focusing on two timely domains of interest – gender equality and public health – iTRUST will deliver (i) the largest ever dataset of online text, annotated with features relevant for ethos, pathos and reframing; (ii) a new methodology of large-scale comparative trust analytics to detect implicit patterns and trends in hate speech and fake news; (iii) a novel empirical account of how these patterns affect polarisation in online communication and in society at large; and (iv) AI-based applications that will transfer these insights into interventions against hate speech, fake news and polarisation. Given the relevance for the knowledge-based society, the project puts great emphasis on outreach activities and users’ awareness in collaboration with media, museums and other partners.

  The consortium consists of five experienced PIs with expertise in rhetoric, comparative political science, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, multi-agent systems and computational argumentation. The group is complemented by senior experts (ACP and KEP) in fields that provide valuable extensions, such as media studies and AI-based technologies. Our long-term ambition is to establish a pan-European network and foundations for trustworthy AI in response to the EC priority of “Europe fit for the Digital Age”.

  • The project funded by “Foundations for Misbehaviour Detection and Mitigation Strategies in Online Social Networks and Media” (OSNEM) program of CHIST-ERA (Future and Emerging Information and Communication Technologies)
  • iTRUST is worth €945k of which €250k comes to Warsaw University of Technology (€250,000; 1,110,000 PLN)
  • Team @WUT: PI: Katarzyna Budzynska; Co-Investigators: Marcin Koszowy, Barbara Konat, tba; PhD student: tba; Research Assistants: tba
  • iTRUST consortium: Lead PI: Katarzyna Budzynska; Co-PIs: Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven (BE); Andrea Rocci, Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano) (CH); Carles Sierra, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute IIIA (ES); Virginie Van Ingelgom, UCLouvain (BE)
  • 11.2022-10.2025 Warsaw University of Technology (WUT)

Rephrasing speakers’ words is a powerful persuasive instrument in an argumentative discourse. The goal of AMoRe is to provide an argumentative model of rephrase by delivering: an annotation scheme and guidelines allowing to map dialogical arguments with rephrase structures; publicly available corpora of annotated rephrase types and structures; an inventory of propositional, stylistic, illocutionary and dialogical patterns associated with the use of rephrase; a methodological protocol allowing the systematic combination of linguistic and cognitive evidence which grounds our novel pragma-rhetorical account; and a fully-fledged pragma-rhetorical model of rephrase which integrates all aspects investigated in this project.

• The project funded by the OPUS-LAP program of the Polish National Science Center (NCN) and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• AMoRe is worth €700k of which €165k comes to Warsaw University of Technology (€165,000; 753,000 PLN)
• Team @WUT: Lead PI: Marcin Koszowy; Co-Investigators:  Katarzyna Budzynska, Barbara Konat; PhD student: tba
• AMoRe consortium: Marcin Koszowy and Katarzyna Budzynska, philosophy of argumentation, rhetoric and corpus linguistics, Warsaw University of Technology (PL; Lead), Barbara Konat, computational linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (PL), Steve Oswald and Pascal Gygax, pragmatics and psychology, University of Fribourg (CH)
• AMoRe International Advisory Board: Isabela Fairclough, discourse analysis,  University of Central Lancashire (UK); Jean Goodwin, communication, North Carolina State University (US); Benno Stein, artificial intelligence, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (DE); Christopher Tindale, argumentation theory, University of Windsor (CA)
• 01.2022-12.2025 Warsaw University of Technology (WUT)

• The project funded by the Polish National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR)
• Leader: Swarmcheck sp. z o.o. (PL)
• Experts: Mariusz Urbański, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; Andrzej Kisielewicz, University of Wrocław; Katarzyna Budzynska and Marcin Koszowy, Warsaw University of Technology
• 12.2021 – 05.2025

The main aim of the EthAn project is to understand the communicative structures of ethos related to a speaker’s character

• Project funded by the HARMONIA 7 program of the Polish National Science Centre (NCN)
• Principal investigator: Katarzyna Budzynska, post-doctoral researchers: Barbara Konat & Marcin Koszowy, consortium partners: Chris Reed (Dundee, Scotland), Patrick Saint-Dizier (Toulouse IRIT, France), Manfred Stede (Postdam, Germany)
• 2016-2019 Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN)

The aim of the project is to revolutionize our understanding of how people influence the course of communication and how logic models dialogue and rhetorical strategies typical in social practice

• Project funded in the OPUS2 program of the Polish National Science Centre (NCN)
• Principal investigator: Katarzyna Budzynska, post-doctoral researcher: Marcin Koszowy, PhD student: Olena Yaskorska
• 08.2012-07.2015 Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences

An initiative which coordinates and support the activities of the Polish School of Argumentation

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