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

Semantic Sort: A Supervised Approach to Personalized Semantic Relatedness

We propose and study a novel supervised approach to learning statistical semantic relatedness models from subjectively annotated training examples. The proposed semantic model consists of parameterized co-occurrence statistics associated with textual units of a large background knowledge corpus. We present an efficient algorithm for learning such semantic models from a training sample of relatedness preferences. Our method is corpus independent and can essentially rely on any sufficiently large (unstructured) collection of coherent texts. Moreover, the approach facilitates the fitting of semantic models for specific users or groups of users. We present the results of extensive range of experiments from small to large scale, indicating that the proposed method is effective and competitive with the state-of-the-art.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures A short version of this paper was already published at ECML/PKDD 201

The Closer the Better: Similarity of Publication Pairs at Different Co-Citation Levels

We investigate the similarities of pairs of articles which are co-cited at the different co-citation levels of the journal, article, section, paragraph, sentence and bracket. Our results indicate that textual similarity, intellectual overlap (shared references), author overlap (shared authors), proximity in publication time all rise monotonically as the co-citation level gets lower (from journal to bracket). While the main gain in similarity happens when moving from journal to article co-citation, all level changes entail an increase in similarity, especially section to paragraph and paragraph to sentence/bracket levels. We compare results from four journals over the years 2010-2015: Cell, the European Journal of Operational Research, Physics Letters B and Research Policy, with consistent general outcomes and some interesting differences. Our findings motivate the use of granular co-citation information as defined by meaningful units of text, with implications for, among others, the elaboration of maps of science and the retrieval of scholarly literature