Prior work has commonly defined argument retrieval from heterogeneous document collections as a sentence-level classification task. Consequently, argument retrieval suffers both from low recall and from sentence segmentation errors making it difficult for humans and machines to consume the arguments. In this work, we argue that the task should be performed on a more fine-grained level of sequence labeling. For this, we define the task as Argument Unit Recognition and Classification (AURC). We present a dataset of arguments from heterogeneous sources annotated as spans of tokens within a sentence, as well as with a corresponding stance. We show that and how such difficult argument annotations can be effectively collected through crowdsourcing with high inter-annotator agreement. The new benchmark, AURC-8, contains up to 15% more arguments per topic as compared to annotations on the sentence level. We identify a number of methods targeted at AURC sequence labeling, achieving close to human performance on known domains. Further analysis also reveals that, contrary to previous approaches, our methods are more robust against sentence segmentation errors. We publicly release our code and the AURC-8 dataset.1

We experiment with two recent contextualized word embedding methods (ELMo and BERT) in the context of open-domain argument search.For the first time, we show how to leverage the power of contextualized word embeddings to classify and cluster topic-dependent arguments, achieving impressive results on both tasks and across multiple datasets.For argument classification, we improve the state-of-the-art for the UKP Sentential Argument Mining Corpus by 20.8 percentage points and for the IBM Debater -Evidence Sentences dataset by 7.4 percentage points.For the understudied task of argument clustering, we propose a pre-training step which improves by 7.8 percentage points over strong baselines on a novel dataset, and by 12.3 percentage points for the Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) Corpus. 1

Automated fact-checking based on machine learning is a promising approach to identify false information distributed on the web.In order to achieve satisfactory performance, machine learning methods require a large corpus with reliable annotations for the different tasks in the fact-checking process.Having analyzed existing fact-checking corpora, we found that none of them meets these criteria in full.They are either too small in size, do not provide detailed annotations, or are limited to a single domain.Motivated by this gap, we present a new substantially sized mixed-domain corpus with annotations of good quality for the core fact-checking tasks: document retrieval, evidence extraction, stance detection, and claim validation.To aid future corpus construction, we describe our methodology for corpus creation and annotation, and demonstrate that it results in substantial inter-annotator agreement.As baselines for future research, we perform experiments on our corpus with a number of model architectures that reach high performance in similar problem settings.Finally, to support the development of future models, we provide a detailed error analysis for each of the tasks.Our results show that the realistic, multi-domain setting defined by our data poses new challenges for the existing models, providing opportunities for considerable improvement by future systems.

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 http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining.

Argument mining is a core technology for automating argument search in large document collections. Despite its usefulness for this task, most current approaches are designed for use only with specific text types and fall short when applied to heterogeneous texts. In this paper, we propose a new sentential annotation scheme that is reliably applicable by crowd workers to arbitrary Web texts. We source annotations for over 25,000 instances covering eight controversial topics. We show that integrating topic information into bidirectional long short-term memory networks outperforms vanilla BiLSTMs by more than 3 percentage points in F1 in two- and three-label cross-topic settings. We also show that these results can be further improved by leveraging additional data for topic relevance using multi-task learning.

In this paper, we propose a new task for assessing the quality of natural language arguments.The premises of a well-reasoned argument should provide enough evidence for accepting or rejecting its claim.Although this criterion, known as sufficiency, is widely adopted in argumentation theory, there are no empirical studies on its applicability to real arguments.In this work, we show that human annotators substantially agree on the sufficiency criterion and introduce a novel annotated corpus.Furthermore, we experiment with feature-rich SVMs and convolutional neural networks and achieve 84% accuracy for automatically identifying insufficiently supported arguments.The final corpus as well as the annotation guideline are freely available for encouraging future research on argument quality. 1

Argument mining has become a popular research area in NLP.It typically includes the identification of argumentative components, e.g.claims, as the central component of an argument.We perform a qualitative analysis across six different datasets and show that these appear to conceptualize claims quite differently.To learn about the consequences of such different conceptualizations of claim for practical applications, we carried out extensive experiments using state-of-the-art featurerich and deep learning systems, to identify claims in a cross-domain fashion.While the divergent conceptualization of claims in different datasets is indeed harmful to cross-domain classification, we show that there are shared properties on the lexical level as well as system configurations that can help to overcome these gaps.

In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures. The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations using Integer Linear Programming. We show that our model significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines on two different types of discourse. Moreover, we introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for identifying argumentative discourse structures in persuasive essays. The structure of argumentation consists of several components (i.e. claims and premises) that are connected with argumentative relations. We consider this task in two consecutive steps. First, we identify the components of arguments using multiclass classification. Second, we classify a pair of argument components as either support or non-support for identifying the structure of argumentative discourse. For both tasks, we evaluate several classifiers and propose novel feature sets including structural, lexical, syntactic and contextual features. In our experiments, we obtain a macro F1-score of 0.726 for identifying argument components and 0.722 for argumentative relations.

Nowadays a wide range of input devices are available to users of technical systems. Especially modern alternative interaction devices, which are known from game consoles etc., provide a more natural way of interaction. In parallel to that the research on visualization of large amount of data advances very quickly. This research was also influenced by the semantic web and the idea of storing data in a structured and linked form. The semantically annotated data gains more and more importance in information acquisition processes. Especially the Linked Open Data (LOD) format already experienced a huge growth. However, the user-interfaces of web-applications mostly do not reflect the added value of semantics data. This paper describes the conceptual design and implementation of an Interactive Exploration System that offers a user-centered graphical environment of web-based knowledge repositories, to support and optimize explorative learning, and the integration of a taxonomy-based approach to enable the use of more natural interaction metaphors, as they are possible with modern devices like Wii Mote or Microsoft Kinect. Therefore we introduce a different classification for interaction devices, and current approaches for supporting the added values in semantics visualizations. Furthermore, we describe the concept of our IES, including a strategy to organize and structure today's existing input devices, and a semantics exploration system driven by user-experience. We conclude the paper with a description of the implementation of the IES and an application scenario.