In plain words: Instead of labeling two arguments as support or attack directly, the system rebuilds short texts where the pair fits naturally or awkwardly and picks whichever reads more plausible. It matched earlier approaches and scored over 10% higher when the surrounding discourse clues were hidden.
Abstract
We formulate argumentative relation classification (support vs. attack) as a text-plausibility ranking task. To this aim, we propose a simple reconstruction trick which enables us to build minimal pairs of plausible and implausible texts by simulating natural contexts in which two argumentative units are likely or unlikely to appear. We show that this method is competitive with previous work albeit it is considerably simpler. In a recently introduced content-based version of the task, where contextual discourse clues are hidden, the approach offers a performance increase of more than 10% macro F1. With respect to the scarce attack-class, the method achieves a large increase in precision while the incurred loss in recall is small or even nonexistent.
Juri Opitz
arXiv:1909.09031 · cs.CL · submitted Sep 19, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 15th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2019)