Siddharth Bhargava

I did my Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore India between the years 2015 - 2019. I developed an interest in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence by participating in various coding competitions and hackathons, and doing online courses in data science and machine learning through Coursera and Udacity.

I joined the Master of Science in Data Science at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich Germany in 2019. I dived deeper into the field of data science, studying advanced courses in Statistics and Informatics. I worked as a Research Student at the Database Systems Lab at LMU Munich, working extensively in the field of Argument Mining, initially focusing on argument detection and extraction and later on argument strength. I developed a deeper interest in this domain and continued my research work into my Master Thesis titled, "Generalization in Diversity-Aware Argument Strength Models". In this study I focused on studying if a holistic definition of argument strength can be achieved by training a model that learns from different definitions or interpretations of argument strengths and then defines a generalized interpretation, applicable for all.

At the moment I have been accepted as a MSCA doctoral candidate under the HYBRIDS Initiative, co-funded by EU and UKRI. I work on the problem statement, "Identifying the stance of argumentative opinions in political discourse", under the guidance of Dr. Sara Tonelli. This three year program, starting in September 2023, will focus on building an expert system that can identify, quantify and detect stances of arguments in various relevant political issues, such as Immigration or Euroscepticism.

I am currently working on argumentation study in the political discourse, as part of the HYBRIDS Initiative by EU and UKRI. I am studying about how to accurately perform stance detection in political arguments or opinions shared on various conversational/dialogical platforms including social media and online debate portals.

As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Fellow, I also represent my program at various Outreach and Dissemination events such as at Workshops, Science and Technology Fairs, Conferences and Training events.

Dialogical Argumentation; Computational Linguistics; Political Discourse Analysis;

Fromm, M., Faerman, E., Berrendorf, M., Bhargava, S., Qi, R., Zhang, Y., Dennert, L., Selle, S., Mao, Y., & Seidl, T. (2021). Argument mining driven analysis of peer-reviews. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35(6), 4758-4766. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i6.16607

Fromm, Michael and Berrendorf, Max and Reiml, Johanna and Mayerhofer, Isabelle and Bhargava, Siddharth et al., Towards a holistic view on argument quality prediction, arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.09803, 2022