The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.
Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of the argument's claims given the pragmatic and discourse context of the argument. Among these characteristics of persuasive arguments, prior work in NLP does not explicitly investigate the effect of the pragmatic and discourse context when determining argument quality. This paper presents a new dataset to initiate the study of this aspect of argumentation: i…
Although Natural Language Processing (NLP) research on argument mining has advanced considerably in recent years, most studies draw on corpora of asynchronous and written texts, often produced by individuals. Few published corpora of synchronous, multi-party argumentation are available. The Discussion Tracker corpus, collected in American high school English classes, is an annotated dataset of transcripts of spoken, multi-party argumentation. The corpus consists of 29 multi-party discussions of English literature transcribed from 985 minutes of audio. The transcripts were annotated for three d…
At the foundation of scientific evaluation is the labor-intensive process of peer review. This critical task requires participants to consume vast amounts of highly technical text. Prior work has annotated different aspects of review argumentation, but discourse relations between reviews and rebuttals have yet to be examined. We present DISAPERE, a labeled dataset of 20k sentences contained in 506 review-rebuttal pairs in English, annotated by experts. DISAPERE synthesizes label sets from prior work and extends them to include fine-grained annotation of the rebuttal sentences, characterizing t…
Opinion formation and persuasion in argumentation are affected by three major factors: the argument itself, the source of the argument, and the properties of the audience. Understanding the role of each and the interplay between them is crucial for obtaining insights regarding argument interpretation and generation. It is particularly important for building effective argument generation systems that can take both the discourse and the audience characteristics into account. Having such personalized argument generation systems would be helpful to expose individuals to different viewpoints and he…
Argumentation mining from social media content has attracted increasing attention. The task is both challenging and rewarding. The informal nature of user-generated content makes the task dauntingly difficult. On the other hand, the insights that could be gained by a large-scale analysis of social media argumentation make it a very worthwhile task. In this position paper I discuss the motivation for social media argumentation mining, as well as the tasks and challenges involved.
Identifying argument components from unstructured texts and predicting the relationships expressed among them are two primary steps of argument mining. The intrinsic complexity of these tasks demands powerful learning models. While pretrained Transformer-based Language Models (LM) have been shown to provide state-of-the-art results over different NLP tasks, the scarcity of manually annotated data and the highly domain-dependent nature of argumentation restrict the capabilities of such models. In this work, we propose a novel transfer learning strategy to overcome these challenges. We utilize a…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the increasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome, largely ignoring the dynamic patterns in argumentation processes. This paper presents a study that automatically analyzes the key factors in argument persuasiveness, beyond simply predicting who will persuade whom. Specifically, we propose a novel neural model that is able to dynamically track the changes of latent topics and discourse in argumentative conve…
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Center for Information and Language Processing（信息与语言处理中心）
Computational Argumentation in general and Argument Mining in particular are important research fields. In previous works, many of the challenges to automatically extract and to some degree reason over natural language arguments were addressed. The tools to extract argument units are increasingly available and further open problems can be addressed. In this work, we are presenting the task of Aspect-Based Argument Mining (ABAM), with the essential subtasks of Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) and Nested Segmentation (NS). At the first instance, we create and release an annotated corpus with aspect …
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-TUDA)（普适知识处理实验室（UKP-TUDA））；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de
We investigate whether and where multi-task learning (MTL) can improve performance on NLP problems related to argumentation mining (AM), in particular argument component identification. Our results show that MTL performs particularly well (and better than single-task learning) when little training data is available for the main task, a common scenario in AM. Our findings challenge previous assumptions that conceptualizations across AM datasets are divergent and that MTL is difficult for semantic or higher-level tasks.
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；German Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information（德国教育研究与教育信息研究所）
We investigate neural techniques for end-to-end computational argumentation mining (AM). We frame AM both as a token-based dependency parsing and as a token-based sequence tagging problem, including a multi-task learning setup. Contrary to models that operate on the argument component level, we find that framing AM as dependency parsing leads to subpar performance results. In contrast, less complex (local) tagging models based on BiLSTMs perform robustly across classification scenarios, being able to catch long-range dependencies inherent to the AM problem. Moreover, we find that jointly learn…
Università degli Studi di Udine（乌迪内大学）；Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Internet users generate content at unprecedented rates. Building intelligent systems capable of discriminating useful content within this ocean of information is thus becoming a urgent need. In this paper, we aim to predict the usefulness of Amazon reviews, and to do this we exploit features coming from an off-the-shelf argumentation mining system. We argue that the usefulness of a review, in fact, is strictly related to its argumentative content, whereas the use of an already trained system avoids the costly need of relabeling a novel dataset. Results obtained on a large publicly available co…
Vyatka State University（维亚特卡国立大学）；ITMO University（ITMO大学）
Argumentation mining is a field of computational linguistics that is devoted to extracting from texts and classifying arguments and relations between them, as well as constructing an argumentative structure. A significant obstacle to research in this area for the Russian language is the lack of annotated Russian-language text corpora. This article explores the possibility of improving the quality of argumentation mining using the extension of the Russian-language version of the Argumentative Microtext Corpus (ArgMicro) based on the machine translation of the Persuasive Essays Corpus (PersEssay…
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-TUDA)（普适知识处理实验室（UKP-TUDA））；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity. We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine) translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for …
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Scholarly Argumentation Mining (SAM) has recently gained attention due to its potential to help scholars with the rapid growth of published scientific literature. It comprises two subtasks: argumentative discourse unit recognition (ADUR) and argumentative relation extraction (ARE), both of which are challenging since they require e.g. the integration of domain knowledge, the detection of implicit statements, and the disambiguation of argument structure. While previous work focused on dataset construction and baseline methods for specific document sections, such as abstract or results, full-tex…
Multi-task learning has recently become a very active field in deep learning research. In contrast to learning a single task in isolation, multiple tasks are learned at the same time, thereby utilizing the training signal of related tasks to improve the performance on the respective machine learning tasks. Related work shows various successes in different domains when applying this paradigm and this thesis extends the existing empirical results by evaluating multi-task learning in four different scenarios: argumentation mining, epistemic segmentation, argumentation component segmentation, and …
Cross-Genre Argument Mining: Can Language Models Automatically Fill in Missing Discourse Markers?
Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciência de Computadores (LIACC)（人工智能与计算机科学实验室（LIACC））；Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）；Natural Language Learning Group (NLLG)（自然语言学习组（NLLG））；Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学技术学院）
We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two differen…
The growing interest in argument mining and computational argumentation brings with it a plethora of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks and corresponding datasets. However, as with many other NLU tasks, the dominant language is English, with resources in other languages being few and far between. In this work, we explore the potential of transfer learning using the multilingual BERT model to address argument mining tasks in non-English languages, based on English datasets and the use of machine translation. We show that such methods are well suited for classifying the stance of argumen…
Synapse Développement（突触开发公司）；IRIT, University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学IRIT研究所）；IRIT, CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心IRIT研究所）
Current state of the art systems in NLP heavily rely on manually annotated datasets, which are expensive to construct. Very little work adequately exploits unannotated data -- such as discourse markers between sentences -- mainly because of data sparseness and ineffective extraction methods. In the present work, we propose a method to automatically discover sentence pairs with relevant discourse markers, and apply it to massive amounts of data. Our resulting dataset contains 174 discourse markers with at least 10k examples each, even for rare markers such as coincidentally or amazingly We use …
A Context-Aware Dataset for Stance Detection in Bioethical Controversies on Reddit
School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学人工智能学院）；School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University（北京大学城市规划与设计学院）
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Brighton（布莱顿大学）；University of Dundee（邓迪大学）
To adequately model mathematical arguments the analyst must be able to represent the mathematical objects under discussion and the relationships between them, as well as inferences drawn about these objects and relationships as the discourse unfolds. We introduce a framework with these properties, which has been used to analyse mathematical dialogues and expository texts. The framework can recover salient elements of discourse at, and within, the sentence level, as well as the way mathematical content connects to form larger argumentative structures. We show how the framework might be used to …
Vyatka State University（维亚特卡国立大学）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
Argumentation analysis is a field of computational linguistics that studies methods for extracting arguments from texts and the relationships between them, as well as building argumentation structure of texts. This paper is a report of the organizers on the first competition of argumentation analysis systems dealing with Russian language texts within the framework of the Dialogue conference. During the competition, the participants were offered two tasks: stance detection and argument classification. A corpus containing 9,550 sentences (comments on social media posts) on three topics related t…
On Theoretically-Driven LLM Agents for Multi-Dimensional Discourse Analysis
Laboratory of The New Ethos, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland（新伦理实验室，华沙理工大学，波兰）；Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland（电子与信息技术学院，华沙理工大学，波兰）
Argument mining tasks require an informed range of low to high complexity linguistic phenomena and commonsense knowledge. Previous work has shown that pre-trained language models are highly effective at encoding syntactic and semantic linguistic phenomena when applied with transfer learning techniques and built on different pre-training objectives. It remains an issue of how much the existing pre-trained language models encompass the complexity of argument mining tasks. We rely on experimentation to shed light on how language models obtained from different lexical semantic families leverage th…
AMELIA: A Family of Multi-task End-to-end Language Models for Argumentation
Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂1大学）；CNRS（国家科学研究中心）；Ecole Centrale de Lyon（里昂中央理工大学）；INSA Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；Université Lumiere Lyon 2（里昂2大学）；LIRIS（图像研究所）
Amirkabir University of Technology（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学）；Allame Tabatabaei Universiy（阿拉梅·塔巴塔巴伊大学）；Tarbiat Modarres University（塔比亚特莫达雷斯大学）
One of the new scientific ways of understanding discourse dynamics is analyzing the public data of social networks. This research's aim is Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis (PDA) of Covid-19 phenomenon (inspired by Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory) by using Intelligent Data Mining for Persian Society. The examined big data is five million tweets from 160,000 users of the Persian Twitter network to compare two discourses. Besides analyzing the tweet texts individually, a social network graph database has been created based on retweets relationships. We use the VoteRank algorithm to intr…
Argumentation is a type of discourse where speakers try to persuade their audience about the reasonableness of a claim by presenting supportive arguments. Most work in argument mining has focused on modeling arguments in monologues. We propose a computational model for argument mining in online persuasive discussion forums that brings together the micro-level (argument as product) and macro-level (argument as process) models of argumentation. Fundamentally, this approach relies on identifying relations between components of arguments in a discussion thread. Our approach for relation prediction…
Several tasks in argumentation mining and debating, question-answering, and natural language inference involve classifying a sequence in the context of another sequence (referred as bi-sequence classification). For several single sequence classification tasks, the current state-of-the-art approaches are based on recurrent and convolutional neural networks. On the other hand, for bi-sequence classification problems, there is not much understanding as to the best deep learning architecture. In this paper, we attempt to get an understanding of this category of problems by extensive empirical eval…
Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Argument Component Boundary Detection (ACBD) is an important sub-task in argumentation mining; it aims at identifying the word sequences that constitute argument components, and is usually considered as the first sub-task in the argumentation mining pipeline. Existing ACBD methods heavily depend on task-specific knowledge, and require considerable human efforts on feature-engineering. To tackle these problems, in this work, we formulate ACBD as a sequence labeling problem and propose a variety of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, which do not use domain specific or handcrafted feat…
This paper describes an English audio and textual dataset of debating speeches, a unique resource for the growing research field of computational argumentation and debating technologies. We detail the process of speech recording by professional debaters, the transcription of the speeches with an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, their consequent automatic processing to produce a text that is more "NLP-friendly", and in parallel -- the manual transcription of the speeches in order to produce gold-standard "reference" transcripts. We release 60 speeches on various controversial topics, …
Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Faculty of Arts, Charles University（查理大学文学院捷克国家语料库研究所）；Department of Slavic Studies, Brown University（布朗大学斯拉夫语研究系）
This paper describes how corpus-assisted discourse analysis based on keyword (KW) identification and interpretation can benefit from employing Market basket analysis (MBA) after KW extraction. MBA is a data mining technique used originally in marketing that can reveal consistent associations between items in a shopping cart, but also between keywords in a corpus of many texts. By identifying recurring associations between KWs we can compensate for the lack of wider context which is a major issue impeding the interpretation of isolated KWs (esp. when analyzing large data). To showcase the advan…
In order to face the complexity of business environments and detect priorities while triggering contingency strategies, we propose a new methodological approach that combines text mining, social network and big data analytics, with the assessment of stakeholders' attitudes towards company core values. This approach was applied in a case study where we considered the Twitter discourse about core values in Italy. We collected more than 94,000 tweets related to the core values of the firms listed in Fortune's ranking of the World's Most Admired Companies (2013-2017). For the Italian scenario, we …
