Moderating user comments and promoting healthy understanding is a challenging task, especially in the context of polarized topics such as climate change. We propose a moderation tool to assist moderators in promoting mutual understanding in regard to this topic. The approach is twofold. First, we train classifiers to label incoming posts for the arguments they entail, with a specific focus on minority arguments. We apply active learning to further supplement the training data with rare arguments. Second, we dive deeper into singular arguments and extract the lexical patterns that distinguish each argument from the others. Our findings indicate that climate change arguments form clearly separable clusters in the embedding space. These classes are characterized by their own unique lexical patterns that provide a quick insight in an argument's key concepts. Additionally, supplementing our training data was necessary for our classifiers to be able to adequately recognize rare arguments. We argue that this detailed rundown of each argument provides insight into where others are coming from. These computational approaches can be part of the toolkit for content moderators and researchers struggling with other polarized debates.

Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate

If you are a virtual attendee please click on the button above to join the live session **Chairs:** Santiago Egea, Simon Mille and Aswarth Abhilash Dara

VPS1 - Sentiment Analysis, Opinion and Argument Mining

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First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Cedric Waterschoot

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Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate

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