Writing strong arguments can be challenging for learners. It requires to select and arrange multiple argumentative discourse units (ADUs) in a logical and coherent way as well as to decide which ADUs to leave implicit, so called enthymemes. However, when important ADUs are missing, readers might not be able to follow the reasoning or understand the argument's main point. This paper introduces two new tasks for learner arguments: to identify gaps in arguments (enthymeme detection) and to fill such gaps (enthymeme reconstruction). Approaches to both tasks may help learners improve their argument quality. We study how corpora for these tasks can be created automatically by deleting ADUs from an argumentative text that are central to the argument and its quality, while maintaining the text's naturalness. Based on the ICLEv3 corpus of argumentative learner essays, we create 40,089 argument instances for enthymeme detection and reconstruction. Through manual studies, we provide evidence that the proposed corpus creation process leads to the desired quality reduction, and results in arguments that are similarly natural to those written by learners. Finally, first baseline approaches to enthymeme detection and reconstruction demonstrate the corpus' usefulness.

Mind the Gap: Automated Corpus Creation for Enthymeme Detection and Reconstruction in Learner Arguments

Language education has been shown to benefit from computational argumentation, for example, from methods that assess quality dimensions of language learners' argumentative essays, such as their organization and argument strength. So far, however, little attention has been paid to cultural differences in learners' argument structures originating from different origins and language capabilities. This paper extends prior studies of learner argumentation by analyzing differences in the argument structure of essays from culturally diverse learners. Based on the ICLE corpus containing essays written by English learners of 16 different mother tongues, we train natural language processing models to mine argumentative discourse units (ADUs) as well as to assess the essays' quality in terms of organization and argument strength. The extracted ADUs and the predicted quality scores enable us to look into the similarities and differences of essay argumentation across different English learners. In particular, we analyze the ADUs from learners with different mother tongues, different levels of arguing proficiency, and different context cultures.

Analyzing Culture-Specific Argument Structures in Learner Essays

As AI is more and more pervasive in everyday life, humans have an increasing demand to understand its behavior and decisions. Most research on explainable AI builds on the premise that there is one ideal explanation to be found. In fact, however, everyday explanations are co-constructed in a dialogue between the person explaining (the explainer) and the specific person being explained to (the explainee). In this paper, we introduce a first corpus of dialogical explanations to enable NLP research on how humans explain as well as on how AI can learn to imitate this process. The corpus consists of 65 transcribed English dialogues from the Wired video series 5 Levels, explaining 13 topics to five explainees of different proficiency. All 1550 dialogue turns have been manually labeled by five independent professionals for the topic discussed as well as for the dialogue act and the explanation move performed. We analyze linguistic patterns of explainers and explainees, and we explore differences across proficiency levels. BERT-based baseline results indicate that sequence information helps predicting topics, acts, and moves effectively.

"Mama Always Had a Way of Explaining Things So I Could Understand": A Dialogue Corpus for Learning to Construct Explanations

This paper studies the (often implicit) human values behind natural language arguments, such as to have freedom of thought or to be broadminded. Values are commonly accepted answers to why some option is desirable in the ethical sense and are thus essential both in real-world argumentation and theoretical argumentation frameworks. However, their large variety has been a major obstacle to modeling them in argument mining. To overcome this obstacle, we contribute an operationalization of human values, namely a multi-level taxonomy with 54 values that is in line with psychological research. Moreover, we provide a dataset of 5270 arguments from four geographical cultures, manually annotated for human values. First experiments with the automatic classification of human values are promising, with F 1 -scores up to 0.81 and 0.25 on average.

Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments

An audience’s prior beliefs and morals are strong indicators of how likely they will be affected by a given argument. Utilizing such knowledge can help focus on shared values to bring disagreeing parties towards agreement. In argumentation technology, however, this is barely exploited so far. This paper studies the feasibility of automatically generating morally framed arguments as well as their effect on
different audiences. Following the moral foundation theory, we propose a system that effectively generates arguments focusing on different morals. In an in-depth user study, we ask liberals and conservatives to evaluate the impact of these arguments. Our results suggest that, particularly when prior beliefs are challenged, an audience becomes more affected by morally framed arguments.

The Moral Debater: A Study on the Computational Generation of Morally Framed Arguments

Framing a news article means to portray the reported event from a specific perspective, e.g., from an economic or a health perspective. Reframing means to change this perspective. Depending on the audience or the submessage, reframing can become necessary to achieve the desired effect on the readers. Reframing is related to adapting style and sentiment, which can be tackled with neural text generation techniques. However, it is more challenging since changing a frame requires rewriting entire sentences rather than single phrases. In this paper, we study how to computationally reframe sentences in news articles while maintaining their coherence to the context. We treat reframing as a sentence-level fill-in-the-blank task for which we train neural models on an existing media frame corpus. To guide the training, we propose three strategies: framed-language pretraining, named-entity preservation, and adversarial learning. We evaluate respective models automatically and manually for topic consistency, coherence, and successful reframing. Our results indicate that generating properly-framed text works well but with tradeoffs.

Controlled Neural Sentence-Level Reframing of News Articles

Generating high-quality arguments, while being challenging, may benefit a wide range of downstream applications, such as writing assistants and argument search engines. Motivated by the effectiveness of utilizing knowledge graphs for supporting general text generation tasks, this paper investigates the usage of argumentation-related knowledge graphs to control the generation of arguments. In particular, we construct and populate three knowledge graphs, employing several compositions of them to encode various knowledge into texts of debate portals and relevant paragraphs from Wikipedia. Then, the texts with the encoded knowledge are used to fine-tune a pre-trained text generation model, GPT-2. We evaluate the newly created arguments manually and automatically, based on several dimensions important in argumentative contexts, including argumentativeness and plausibility. The results demonstrate the positive impact of encoding the graphs' knowledge into debate portal texts for generating arguments with superior quality than those generated without knowledge.

Employing Argumentation Knowledge Graphs for Neural Argument Generation

To learn about the major problems, we provide a short but comprehensive survey based on two complementary studies: (1) a literature review where we collect and organise problems known from interviews with workers, and (2) an empirical data analysis where we use topic modelling to mine workers’ complaints from a new English corpus of workers’ forum discussions.

Mining Crowdsourcing Problems from Discussion Forums of Workers

Several quality dimensions of natural language arguments have been investigated. Some are likely to be reflected in linguistic features (e.g., an argument's arrangement), whereas others depend on context (e.g., relevance) or topic knowledge (e.g., acceptability). In this paper, we study the intrinsic computational assessment of 15 dimensions, i.e., only learning from an argument's text. In systematic experiments with eight feature types on an existing corpus, we observe moderate but significant learning success for most dimensions. Rhetorical quality seems hardest to assess, and subjectivity features turn out strong, although length bias in the corpus impedes full validity. We also find that human assessors differ more clearly to each other than to our approach.

Intrinsic Quality Assessment of Arguments

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020 Task 11 on Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. The task featured two subtasks. Subtask SI is about SpanIdentification: given a plain-text document, spot the specific text fragments containing propaganda. Subtask TC is about Technique Classification: given a specific text fragment, in the context of a full document, determine the propaganda technique it uses, choosing from an inventory of 14 possible propaganda techniques. The task attracted a large number of participants: 250teams signed up to participate and 44 made a submission on the test set. In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For both subtasks, the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles.

Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles

Debate portals and similar web platforms constitute one of the main text sources in computational argumentation research and its applications. While the corpora built upon these sources are rich of argumentatively relevant content and structure, they also include text that is irrelevant, or even detrimental, to their purpose. In this paper, we present a precision-oriented approach to detecting such irrelevant text in a semi-supervised way. Given a few seed examples, the approach automatically learns basic lexical patterns of relevance and irrelevance and then incrementally bootstraps new patterns from sentences matching the patterns. In the existing args.me corpus with 400k argumentative texts, our approach detects almost 87k irrelevant sentences, at a precision of 0.97 according to manual evaluation. With low effort, the approach can be adapted to other web argument corpora, providing a generic way to improve corpus quality.

Semi-Supervised Cleansing of Web Argument Corpora

Social bias in language - towards genders, ethnicities, ages, and other social groups - poses a problem with ethical impact for many NLP applications. Recent research has shown that machine learning models trained on respective data may not only adopt, but even amplify the bias. So far, however, little attention has been paid to bias in computational argumentation. In this paper, we study the existence of social biases in large English debate portals. In particular, we train word embedding models on portal-specific corpora and systematically evaluate their bias using WEAT, an existing metric to measure bias in word embeddings. In a word co-occurrence analysis, we then investigate causes of bias. The results suggest that all tested debate corpora contain unbalanced and biased data, mostly in favor of male people with European-American names. Our empirical insights contribute towards an understanding of bias in argumentative data sources.

Argument from Old Man’s View: Assessing Social Bias in Argumentation

News editorials aim to shape the opinions of their readership and the general public on timely controversial issues. The impact of an editorial on the reader’s opinion does not only depend on its content and style, but also on the reader’s profile. Previous work has studied the effect of editorial style depending on general political ideologies (liberals vs. conservatives). In our work, we dig deeper into the persuasiveness of both content and style, exploring the role of the intensity of an ideology (lean vs. extreme) and the reader’s personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness). Concretely, we train content- and style-based models on New York Times editorials for different ideology- and personality-specific groups. Our results suggest that particularly readers with extreme ideology and non “role model” personalities are impacted by style. We further analyze the importance of various text features with respect to the editorials’ impact, the readers’ profile, and the editorials’ geographical scope.

Persuasiveness of News Editorials depending on Ideology and Personality

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
In-person printed posters are available for in-person attendees only.
 
**Are you attending this poster session in person?** 
Hybrid posters are displayed in the East Foyer.

PS5 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Click on the Live Session Recording to view the session 
[Live Session Recording Part 1](https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/pUPpZTK8rVWzT8_FbX6mRJWr5MI08eWWe0_ZSodCW_heqkTqYIr3DzS1E6suXKxo.o8P6Dm0QdsSnWs8V) [Live Session Recording Part 2](https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/0JVri42ZuXEwmMiATnaRjpNcXGJ6e7ftNvMymF3zgt-YmQqT7CeqrBoRPa4ESjUG.d8s8VHcwsGg3ttrK?startTime=1665986901000)
 
**Workshop overview:** Argument mining (also known as "argumentation mining") is a growing research area within computational linguistics. At its heart, argument mining involves the automatic identification of argumentative structures in free text, such as the conclusions, premises, and inference schemes of arguments, as well as their pro- and con-relations. To date, researchers have investigated argument mining on many genres, such as legal documents, product reviews, news articles, online debates, Wikipedia articles, essays, academic literature, tweets, and dialogues. In addition, argument quality assessment and generation are also important problems. Argument mining gives rise to various practical applications of great importance. In particular, it provides methods that can find and visualize the main pro and con arguments in written text and dialogue and that enable argument search on the web for a topic of interest. In educational contexts, argument mining can be applied to written and diagrammed arguments for instructing and assessing students' critical thinking. In information retrieval, argument mining is expected to play a salient role in the emerging field of conversational search.

We are looking for diverse research work on argument mining in real-world applications from various domains. Real-world applications include argument analysis in education, finance, law, public policy, and other social sciences, argument web search, opinion analysis in customer reviews, argument analysis in meetings, and scientific writing. [**Read more.**](https://argmining-org.github.io/2022/) Our detailed schedule can be viewed [**here.**](https://argmining-org.github.io/2022/)

W14 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

workshop paper

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

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

Click on the Live Session Recording to view the session

OS13 - Dialogue and Conversational Interaction

technical paper

OS2-6: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining 1

findings / work in progress

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Findings Papers - Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Poster 2T: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

POSTER23: Applications: Abusive language, bias, fake news and rumours detection

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

SHORT5: Discourse, Parsing,  Dialogue and others

SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. While meaning is intuitive to humans, transferring those intuitions to computational analysis has proved elusive.

This series of evaluations is providing a mechanism to characterize in more precise terms exactly what is necessary to compute in meaning. As such, the evaluations provide an emergent mechanism to identify the problems and solutions for computations with meaning. These exercises have evolved to articulate more of the dimensions that are involved in our use of language. They began with apparently simple attempts to identify word senses computationally. They have evolved to investigate the interrelationships among the elements in a sentence (e.g., semantic role labeling), relations between sentences (e.g., coreference), and the nature of what we are saying (semantic relations and sentiment analysis).

The purpose of the SemEval and Senseval exercises is to evaluate semantic analysis systems. "Semantic Analysis" refers to a formal analysis of meaning, and "computational" refer to approaches that in principle support effective implementation.

The first three evaluations, Senseval-1 through Senseval-3, were focused on word sense disambiguation (WSD), each time growing in the number of languages offered in the tasks and in the number of participating teams. Beginning with the fourth workshop, SemEval-2007 (SemEval-1), the nature of the tasks evolved to include semantic analysis tasks outside of word sense disambiguation.

Triggered by the conception of the STARSEM conference, the SemEval community had decided to hold the evaluation workshops yearly in association with the STARSEM conference. It was also the decision that not every evaluation task will be run every year, e.g. none of the WSD tasks were included in the SemEval-2012 workshop.





Henning Wachsmuth

13

18

SHORT BIO

Presentations