Thailand

Argument Mining (AM) is the task of automatically analysing arguments, such that the unstructured information contained in them is converted into structured representations. Undercut is a unique structure in arguments, as it challenges the relationship between a premise and a claim, unlike direct attacks which challenge the claim or the premise itself. Undercut is also an important counterargument device as it often reflects the value of arguers. However, undercuts have not received the attention in the filed of AM they should have --- there is neither much corpus data about undercuts, nor an existing AM model that can automatically recognise them.  
In this paper, we present a real-world dataset of arguments with explicitly annotated undercuts, and the first computational model that is able to recognise them. The dataset consists of 400 arguments, containing 326 undercuts. On this dataset, our approach beats a strong baseline in undercut recognition, with F1 = 38.8%, which is comparable to the performance on recognising direct attacks. We also conduct experiments on a benchmark dataset containing no undercuts, and prove that our approach is as good as the state of the art in terms of recognising the overall structure of arguments. Our work pioneers the systematic analysis and computational modelling of undercuts in real-world arguments, setting a foundation for future research in the role of undercuts in the dynamics of argumentation.

ACL 2024

Computational Modelling of Undercuts in Real-world Arguments

quora

undercut

argument mining

dataset

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

In this paper, we present our framework for DialAM-2024 TaskA: Identification of Propositional Relations and TaskB: Identification of Illocutionary Relations. The goal of task A is to detect argumentative relations between propositions in an argumentative dialogue. i.e., Inference, Conflict, Rephrase while task B aims to detect illocutionary relations between locutions and argumentative propositions in a dialogue. e.g., Asserting, Agreeing, Arguing, Disagreeing. Noticing the definition of the relations are strict and professional under the context of IAT framework, we meticulously curate prompts which not only incorporate formal definition of the relations, but also exhibit the subtle differences between them. The PTLMs are then fine-tuned on the human-designed prompts to enhance its discrimination capability in classifying different theoretical relations by learning from the human instruction and the ground truth samples. After extensive experiments, a fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3-base model exhibits the best performance among all PTLMs with an F1 score of 78.90% on Task B. It is worth noticing that our framework ranks #2 in the ILO - General official leaderboard.

KnowComp at DialAM-2024: Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models for Dialogical Argument Mining with Inference Anchoring Theory

Dialogue Argument Mining(DialAM) is an important branch of Argument Mining(AM). DialAM-2024 is a shared task focusing on dialogue argument mining, which requires us to identify argumentative relations and illocutionary relations among proposition nodes and locution nodes. To accomplish this, we propose a two-stage pipeline, which includes the Two-Step S-Node Prediction Model in Stage 1 and the YA-Node Prediction Model in Stage 2. We also augment the training data in both stages and introduce context in the prediction of Stage 2. We successfully completed the task and achieved good results. Our team KNOWCOMP POKEMON ranked 1st in the ARI Focused score and 4th in the Global Focused score.

KNOWCOMP POKEMON Team at DialAM-2024: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Detecting Relations in Dialogue Argument Mining

In this paper we tackle the shared task DialAM-2024 aiming to annotate dialogue based on the inference anchoring theory (IAT). The task can be split into two parts, identification of propositional relations and identification of illocutionary relations. We propose a pipelined system made up of three parts: (1) locutionary-propositions relation detection, (2) propositional relations detection, and (3) illocutionary relations identification. We fine-tune models independently for each step, and combine at the end for the final system. Our proposed system ranks second overall compared to other participants in the shared task, scoring an average f1-score on both sub-parts of 63.7.

Pungene at DialAM-2024: Identification of Propositional and Illocutionary Relations

Argument retrieval is the task of finding relevant arguments for a given query. While existing approaches rely solely on the semantic alignment of queries and arguments, this first shared task on perspective argument retrieval incorporates perspectives during retrieval, accounting for latent influences in argumentation. We present a novel multilingual dataset covering demographic and socio-cultural (socio) variables, such as age, gender, and political attitude, representing minority and majority groups in society. We distinguish between three scenarios to explore how retrieval systems consider explicitly (in both query and corpus) and implicitly (only in query) formulated perspectives. This paper provides an overview of this shared task and summarizes the results of the six submitted systems. We find substantial challenges in incorporating perspectivism, especially when aiming for personalization based solely on the text of arguments without explicitly providing socio profiles. Moreover, retrieval systems tend to be biased towards the majority group but partially mitigate bias for the female gender. While we bootstrap perspective argument retrieval, further research is essential to optimize retrieval systems to facilitate personalization and reduce polarization.

Overview of PerpectiveArg2024 The First Shared Task on Perspective Argument Retrieval

This paper describes the contribution of team GESIS-DSM to the Perspective Argument Retrieval Task, a task on retrieving socio-culturally relevant and diverse arguments for different user queries. Our experiments and analyses aim to explore the nature of the socio-cultural specialization in argument retrieval: (how) do the arguments written by different socio-cultural groups differ? We investigate the impact of content and style for the task of identifying arguments relevant to a query and a certain demographic attribute. In its different configurations, our system employs sentence embedding representations, arguments generated with Large Language Model, as well as stylistic features. Our final method places third overall in the shared task, and, in comparison, does particularly well in the most difficult evaluation scenario, where the socio-cultural background of the argument author is implicit (i.e. has to be inferred from the text). This result indicates that socio-cultural differences in argument production may indeed be a matter of style.

GESIS-DSM at PerpectiveArg2024: A Matter of Style? Socio-Cultural Differences in Argumentation

This paper reports on the argument mining system submitted to the ArgMining workshop 2024 for The Perspective Argument Retrieval Shared Task (Falk et al., 2024). We combine the strengths of a smaller Sentence BERT model and a Large Language Model: the former is fine-tuned for a contrastive embedding objective and a classification objective whereas the latter is invoked to augment the query and populate the latent space with diverse relevant arguments. We conduct an ablation study on these components to find that each contributes substantially to the diversity and relevance criteria for the top-k retrieval of arguments from the given corpus.

XFACT Team0331 at PerspectiveArg2024: Sampling from Bounded Clusters for Diverse Relevant Argument Retrieval

This paper presents the POLygraph dataset, a unique resource for fake news detection in Polish. The dataset, created by an interdisciplinary team, is composed of two parts: the “fake-or-not” dataset with 11,360 pairs of news articles (identified by their URLs) and corresponding labels, and the “fake-they-say” dataset with 5,082 news articles (identified by their URLs) and tweets commenting on them. Unlike existing datasets, POLygraph encompasses a variety of approaches from source literature, providing a comprehensive resource for fake news detection. The data was collected through manual annotation by expert and non-expert annotators. The project also developed a software tool that uses advanced machine learning techniques to analyze the data and determine content authenticity. The tool and dataset are expected to benefit various entities, from public sector institutions to publishers and fact-checking organizations. Further dataset exploration will foster fake news detection and potentially stimulate the implementation of similar models in other languages. The paper focuses on the creation and composition of the dataset, so it does not include a detailed evaluation of the software tool for content authenticity analysis, which is planned at a later stage of the project.

POLygraph: Polish Fake News Datase

We present XARELLO: a generator of adversarial examples for testing the robustness of text classifiers based on reinforcement learning. Our solution is adaptive, it learns from previous successes and failures in order to better adjust to the vulnerabilities of the attacked model. This reflects the behaviour of a persistent and experienced attacker, which are common in the misinformation-spreading environment. We evaluate our approach using several victim classifiers and credibility-assessment tasks, showing it generates better-quality examples with less queries, and is especially effective against the modern LLMs. We also perform a qualitative analysis to understand the language patterns in the misinformation text that play a role in the attacks.

Know Thine Enemy: Adaptive Attacks on Misinformation Detection Using Reinforcement Learning

We consider how to credibly and reliably assess the opinions of individuals using their social media posts. To this end, this paper makes three contributions. First, we assemble a workflow and approach to applying modern natural language processing (NLP) methods to multi-target user stance detection in the wild. Second, we establish why the multi-target modeling of user stance is qualitatively more complicated than uni-target user-stance detection. Finally, we validate our method by showing how multi-dimensional measurement of user opinions not only reproduces known opinion polling results, but also enables the study of opinion dynamics at high levels of temporal and semantic resolution.

Multi-Target User Stance Discovery on Reddit

Online social networks often create echo chambers where people only hear opinions reinforcing their beliefs.
An echo chamber often generates polarization, leading to conflicts between people with radical opinions.
The echo chamber has been viewed as a human-specific problem, but this implicit assumption is becoming less reasonable as large language models, such as ChatGPT, acquire social abilities. 
In response to this situation, we investigated the potential for polarization to occur among a group of autonomous AI agents based on generative language models in an echo chamber environment. 
We had AI agents discuss specific topics and analyzed how the group's opinions changed as the discussion progressed. 
As a result, we found that the group of agents based on ChatGPT tended to become polarized in echo chamber environments. 
The analysis of opinion transitions shows that this result is caused by ChatGPT's high prompt understanding ability to update its opinion by considering its own and surrounding agents' opinions. 
We conducted additional experiments to investigate under what specific conditions AI agents tended to polarize. As a result, we identified factors that influence polarization, such as the agent's persona.

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