Neural End-to-End Learning for Computational Argumentation Mining

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 learning 'natural' subtasks, in a multi-task learning setup, improves performance.Comment: To be published at ACL 201

Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need!

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 cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at \url{http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining}.Comment: Accepted at Coling 201

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

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

Reasoning is a crucial part of natural language argumentation. To comprehend an argument, one must analyze its warrant, which explains why its claim follows from its premises. As arguments are highly contextualized, warrants are usually presupposed and left implicit. Thus, the comprehension does not only require language understanding and logic skills, but also depends on common sense. In this paper we develop a methodology for reconstructing warrants systematically. We operationalize it in a scalable crowdsourcing process, resulting in a freely licensed dataset with warrants for 2k authentic arguments from news comments. On this basis, we present a new challenging task, the argument reasoning comprehension task. Given an argument with a claim and a premise, the goal is to choose the correct implicit warrant from two options. Both warrants are plausible and lexically close, but lead to contradicting claims. A solution to this task will define a substantial step towards automatic warrant reconstruction. However, experiments with several neural attention and language models reveal that current approaches do not suffice.Comment: Accepted as NAACL 2018 Long Paper; see details on the front pag