3,316 research outputs found
Towards Automatic Dialogue Understanding
In this paper we will present work carried out to scale up the system for text understanding called GETARUNS, and port it to be used in dialogue understanding. The current goal is that of extracting automatically argumentative information in order to build argumentative structure. The long term goal is using argumentative structure to produce automatic summarization of spoken dialogues.
Very much like other deep linguistic processing systems (see Allen et al, 2007), our system is a generic text/dialogue understanding system that can be used in connection with an ontology – WordNet – and other similar repositories of commonsense knowledge. Word sense disambiguation takes place at the level of semantic interpretation and is represented in the Discourse Model. We will present the adjustments we made in order to cope with transcribed spoken dialogues like those produced in the ICSI Berkely project. The low level component is organized according to LFG theory; at this level, the system does pronominal binding, quantifier raising and temporal interpretation. The high level component is where the Discourse Model is created from the Logical Form. For longer sentences the system switches from the top-down to the bottom-up system. In case of failure it will back off to the partial system which produces a very lean and shallow semantics with no inference rules.
In a final section, we present preliminary evaluation of the system on two tasks: the task of automatic argumentative labelling and another frequently addressed task: referential vs. non-referential pronominal detection. Results obtained fair much higher than those reported in similar experiments with machine learning approaches
Joint Modeling of Content and Discourse Relations in Dialogues
We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in
spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker
turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are
treated as latent variables. Experimental results on two popular meeting
corpora show that our joint model can outperform state-of-the-art approaches
for both phrase-based content selection and discourse relation prediction
tasks. We also evaluate our model on predicting the consistency among team
members' understanding of their group decisions. Classifiers trained with
features constructed from our model achieve significant better predictive
performance than the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017. 11 page
Summarizing Dialogic Arguments from Social Media
Online argumentative dialog is a rich source of information on popular
beliefs and opinions that could be useful to companies as well as governmental
or public policy agencies. Compact, easy to read, summaries of these dialogues
would thus be highly valuable. A priori, it is not even clear what form such a
summary should take. Previous work on summarization has primarily focused on
summarizing written texts, where the notion of an abstract of the text is well
defined. We collect gold standard training data consisting of five human
summaries for each of 161 dialogues on the topics of Gay Marriage, Gun Control
and Abortion. We present several different computational models aimed at
identifying segments of the dialogues whose content should be used for the
summary, using linguistic features and Word2vec features with both SVMs and
Bidirectional LSTMs. We show that we can identify the most important arguments
by using the dialog context with a best F-measure of 0.74 for gun control, 0.71
for gay marriage, and 0.67 for abortion.Comment: Proceedings of the 21th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of
Dialogue (SemDial 2017
Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically
In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multidimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in
What changed your mind : the roles of dynamic topics and discourse in argumentation process
In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the in- creasing 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 conversations, allowing the investigation of their roles in influencing the outcomes of persuasion. Extensive experiments have been conducted on argumentative conversations on both social media and supreme court. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in identifying persuasive arguments via explicitly exploring dynamic factors of topic and discourse. We further analyze the effects of topics and discourse on persuasiveness, and find that they are both useful -- topics provide concrete evidence while superior discourse styles may bias participants, especially in social media arguments. In addition, we draw some findings from our empirical results, which will help people better engage in future persuasive conversations
Limited Attention and Discourse Structure
This squib examines the role of limited attention in a theory of discourse
structure and proposes a model of attentional state that relates current
hierarchical theories of discourse structure to empirical evidence about human
discourse processing capabilities. First, I present examples that are not
predicted by Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state. Then I
consider an alternative model of attentional state, the cache model, which
accounts for the examples, and which makes particular processing predictions.
Finally I suggest a number of ways that future research could distinguish the
predictions of the cache model and the stack model.Comment: 9 pages, uses twoside,cl,lingmacro
Argumentation dialogues in web-based GDSS: an approach using machine learning techniques
Tese de doutoramento em InformaticsA tomada de decisão está presente no dia a dia de qualquer pessoa, mesmo que muitas vezes ela
não tenha consciência disso. As decisões podem estar relacionadas com problemas quotidianos, ou
podem estar relacionadas com questões mais complexas, como é o caso das questões organizacionais.
Normalmente, no contexto organizacional, as decisões são tomadas em grupo.
Os Sistemas de Apoio à Decisão em Grupo têm sido estudados ao longo das últimas décadas com o
objetivo de melhorar o apoio prestado aos decisores nas mais diversas situações e/ou problemas a resolver.
Existem duas abordagens principais à implementação de Sistemas de Apoio à Decisão em Grupo:
a abordagem clássica, baseada na agregação matemática das preferências dos diferentes elementos do
grupo e as abordagens baseadas na negociação automática (e.g. Teoria dos Jogos, Argumentação, entre
outras).
Os atuais Sistemas de Apoio à Decisão em Grupo baseados em argumentação podem gerar uma
enorme quantidade de dados. O objetivo deste trabalho de investigação é estudar e desenvolver modelos
utilizando técnicas de aprendizagem automática para extrair conhecimento dos diálogos argumentativos
realizados pelos decisores, mais concretamente, pretende-se criar modelos para analisar, classificar e
processar esses dados, potencializando a geração de novo conhecimento que será utilizado tanto por
agentes inteligentes, como por decisiores reais. Promovendo desta forma a obtenção de consenso entre
os membros do grupo. Com base no estudo da literatura e nos desafios em aberto neste domĂnio,
formulou-se a seguinte hipĂłtese de investigação - É possĂvel usar tĂ©cnicas de aprendizagem automática
para apoiar diálogos argumentativos em Sistemas de Apoio à Decisão em Grupo baseados na web.
No âmbito dos trabalhos desenvolvidos, foram aplicados algoritmos de classificação supervisionados
a um conjunto de dados contendo argumentos extraĂdos de debates online, criando um classificador
de frases argumentativas que pode classificar automaticamente (A favor/Contra) frases argumentativas
trocadas no contexto da tomada de decisão. Foi desenvolvido um modelo de clustering dinâmico para
organizar as conversas com base nos argumentos utilizados. Além disso, foi proposto um Sistema de
Apoio Ă DecisĂŁo em Grupo baseado na web que possibilita apoiar grupos de decisores independentemente
de sua localização geográfica. O sistema permite a criação de problemas multicritério e a configuração
das preferências, intenções e interesses de cada decisor. Este sistema de apoio à decisão baseado na
web inclui os dashboards de relatórios inteligentes que são gerados através dos resultados dos trabalhos
alcançados pelos modelos anteriores já referidos. A concretização de cada um dos objetivos permitiu
validar as questões de investigação identificadas e assim responder positivamente à hipótese definida.Decision-making is present in anyone’s daily life, even if they are often unaware of it. Decisions can be
related to everyday problems, or they can be related to more complex issues, such as organizational
issues. Normally, in the organizational context, decisions are made in groups.
Group Decision Support Systems have been studied over the past decades with the aim of improving
the support provided to decision-makers in the most diverse situations and/or problems to be solved.
There are two main approaches to implementing Group Decision Support Systems: the classical approach,
based on the mathematical aggregation of the preferences of the different elements of the group, and the
approaches based on automatic negotiation (e.g. Game Theory, Argumentation, among others).
Current argumentation-based Group Decision Support Systems can generate an enormous amount
of data. The objective of this research work is to study and develop models using automatic learning techniques
to extract knowledge from argumentative dialogues carried out by decision-makers, more specifically,
it is intended to create models to analyze, classify and process these data, enhancing the generation
of new knowledge that will be used both by intelligent agents and by real decision-makers. Promoting in
this way the achievement of consensus among the members of the group. Based on the literature study
and the open challenges in this domain, the following research hypothesis was formulated - It is possible
to use machine learning techniques to support argumentative dialogues in web-based Group Decision
Support Systems.
As part of the work developed, supervised classification algorithms were applied to a data set containing
arguments extracted from online debates, creating an argumentative sentence classifier that can
automatically classify (For/Against) argumentative sentences exchanged in the context of decision-making.
A dynamic clustering model was developed to organize conversations based on the arguments used. In
addition, a web-based Group Decision Support System was proposed that makes it possible to support
groups of decision-makers regardless of their geographic location. The system allows the creation of multicriteria
problems and the configuration of preferences, intentions, and interests of each decision-maker.
This web-based decision support system includes dashboards of intelligent reports that are generated
through the results of the work achieved by the previous models already mentioned. The achievement of
each objective allowed validation of the identified research questions and thus responded positively to the
defined hypothesis.I also thank to Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, for the Ph.D. grant funding with the reference: SFRH/BD/137150/2018
Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse
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.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in
User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17
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