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

Ludics and its Applications to natural Language Semantics

Proofs, in Ludics, have an interpretation provided by their counter-proofs, that is the objects they interact with. We follow the same idea by proposing that sentence meanings are given by the counter-meanings they are opposed to in a dialectical interaction. The conception is at the intersection of a proof-theoretic and a game-theoretic accounts of semantics, but it enlarges them by allowing to deal with possibly infinite processes

Inferences and Dialogues in Ludics

International audience– We propose to use Ludics as a unified framework for the analysis of dialogue and as a reasoning system. Not only Ludics gives a denotational semantics for Linear Logic, but it uses interaction as a primitive notion. We first sketch a model for pragmatical and rhetorical aspects of dialogue after a brief review of the way the interactive aspect of dialogue may be represented in Ludics. Then we show how taking into account inferences that occur during a dialogue, with respect to a ISU-like model of dialogue. Through various examples we give an analysis of deductive inferences as well as processes making facts explicit that take place during knowledge updating

A dialectics system in which argumentative agents play and arbitrate to reach an agreement

http://www.di.unipi.it/~morge/publis/morge05aail.pdfInternational audienceWe propose in this paper a formal framework in which agents arbitrate and play to reach an agreement. The argumentationbased reasoning manages the con icts between arguments having di erent strengths for di erent agents. The argumentative agents justify the hypothesis to which they commit and take into account the commitments of their interlocutors. A third agent is responsible of the nal decision outcome which is taken by resolving the con ict between two players according to their competence

ArguBlogging:an application for the Argument Web

In this paper, we present a software tool for ‘ArguBlogging’, which allows users to construct debate and discussions across blogs, linking existing and new online resources to form distributed, structured conversations. Arguments and counterarguments can be posed by giving opinions on one’s own blog and replying to other bloggers’ posts. The resulting argument structure is connected to the Argument Web, in which argumentative structures are made semantically explicit and machine-processable. We discuss the ArguBlogging tool and the underlying infrastructure and ontology of the Argument Web

Speech Act Pluralism In Argumentative Polylogues

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 CHIST-ERA/0002/2019I challenge two key assumptions of speech act theory, as applied to argumentation: illocutionary monism, grounded in the idea each utterance has only one (primary) illocutionary force, and the dyadic reduction, which models interaction as a dyadic affair between only two agents (speaker-hearer, proponentopponent). I show how major contributions to speech act inspired study of argumentation adhere to these assumptions even as illocutionary pluralism in argumentative polylogues is a significant empirical fact in need of theoretical attention. I demonstrate this with two examples where arguers interacting with multiple persons convey plural, argumentatively relevant illocutionary forces. Understanding illocutionary pluralism in argumentative polylogues also affords a better account of fallacious and manipulative discourse.publishersversionpublishe

How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations

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 different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions. Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed, with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook

A Critical Discussion Game for Prohibiting Fallacies

The study of fallacies is at the heart of argumentation studies. In response to Hamblin’s devastating critique of the state of the theory of fallacies in 1970, both formal dialectical and informal approaches to fallacies developed. In the current paper, we focus on an influential informal approach to fallacies, part of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Central to the pragma-dialectical method for analysing and evaluating argumentative discourse is the ideal model of a critical discussion. In this discussion model, a dialectical perspective on argumentation is combined with a pragmatic take on communicative interaction. By formalising and computationally implementing the model of a critical discussion, we take a first step in the development of software to computationally model argumentative dialogue in which fallacies are prohibited along the pragmadialectical norms. We do this by defining the Critical Discussion Game, a formal dialogue game based on the pragma-dialectical discussion model, executable on an online user-interface which is part of a larger infrastructure of argumentation software

Are all the pragma-dialectical rules pragmatic?

From a pragma-dialectical perspective, argumentation rules do not receive their normative import from any metaphysical necessity. They are, pragmatically speaking, binding only to the extent that reasonable participants regard them as useful for res olving disputes. This may be misleading with regard to the second pragma-dialectical rule relating to the burden of proof. If the obligation to defend a proffered standpoint is a constitutive rule of competent speech, then the obligation denoted by the burden of proof is more binding upon speakers than a pragmatic approach to the subject would have us believe

Argumentation and Abduction in Dialogical Logic

This chapter advocates for a reconciliation of argumentation theory and formal logic in an agent-centered theory of reasoning, that is, a theory in which inferences are studied as human activities. First, arguments in favor of a divorce between the two fields are presented. Those arguments are not so controversial. However, rather than forcing a radical separation, they urge logicians to rethink the object of their studies. Arguments cannot be analyzed as objects independent from human activity, whether it is dealt with deductive or nondeductive reasoning. The present analysis naturally takes place in the context of dialogical logic in which the proof process and the semantics are conceived in terms of argumentative games, which involve the agents, their commitments and their actions. This work focuses first on deductive reasoning and then takes abduction as a case of nondeductive reasoning. By relying on some relevant ideas of the Gabbay–Woods (GW) schema of abduction and Aliseda’s approach, a new dialogical explanation of abduction in terms of concession-problem is proposed. This notion of concession problem will be defined thereafter. With respect to the topics of the model-based sciences, the question of the specificity of the speech act by means of which a hypothesis is conjectured is set more specifically.Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México PAPIIT, IN400514-3Junta de Andalucía P10- HUM-584