Ranking and Selecting Multi-Hop Knowledge Paths to Better Predict Human Needs

To make machines better understand sentiments, research needs to move from polarity identification to understanding the reasons that underlie the expression of sentiment. Categorizing the goals or needs of humans is one way to explain the expression of sentiment in text. Humans are good at understanding situations described in natural language and can easily connect them to the character's psychological needs using commonsense knowledge. We present a novel method to extract, rank, filter and select multi-hop relation paths from a commonsense knowledge resource to interpret the expression of sentiment in terms of their underlying human needs. We efficiently integrate the acquired knowledge paths in a neural model that interfaces context representations with knowledge using a gated attention mechanism. We assess the model's performance on a recently published dataset for categorizing human needs. Selectively integrating knowledge paths boosts performance and establishes a new state-of-the-art. Our model offers interpretability through the learned attention map over commonsense knowledge paths. Human evaluation highlights the relevance of the encoded knowledge

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