Patrick Montjourides

Also published as: Patrick Montjouridès


2026

This paper presents the UZH Shared Task at the 13th Workshop on Argument Mining and Reasoning, co-located with ACL 2026, which focuses on reconstructing argumentative structure in highly formal legal-political texts, namely United Nations resolutions and recommendations. The shared task addresses the challenge of recovering paragraph-level reasoning patterns from the fairly formulaic structure of international decision-making records. It comprises two subtasks: (1) paragraph classification, where systems identify paragraph type (preambular or operative) and assign one or more thematic tags, and (2) argumentative relation prediction, where systems infer links between paragraphs and label them with relation types.

2025

Religion and spirituality (R/S) are complex and highly domain-dependent concepts which have long confounded researchers and policymakers. Due to their context-specificity, R/S are difficult to operationalize in conventional archival search strategies, particularly when datasets are very large, poorly accessible, and marked by information noise. As a result, considerable time investments and specialist knowledge is often needed to extract actionable insights related to R/S from general archival sources, increasing reliance on published literature and manual desk reviews. To address this challenge, we present SpiritRAG, an interactive Question Answering (Q&A) system based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Built using 7,500 United Nations (UN) resolution documents related to R/S in the domains of health and education, SpiritRAG allows researchers and policymakers to conduct complex, context-sensitive database searches of very large datasets using an easily accessible, chat-based web interface. SpiritRAG is lightweight to deploy and leverages both UN documents and user provided documents as source material. A pilot test and evaluation with domain experts on 100 manually composed questions demonstrates the practical value and usefulness of SpiritRAG.