Beyond facts – a survey and conceptualisation of claims in online discourse analysis

Analyzing statements of facts and claims in online discourse is subject of a multitude of research areas. Methods from natural language processing and computational linguistics help investigate issues such as the spread of biased narratives and falsehoods on the Web. Related tasks include fact-checking, stance detection and argumentation mining. Knowledge-based approaches, in particular works in knowledge base construction and augmentation, are concerned with mining, verifying and representing factual knowledge. While all these fields are concerned with strongly related notions, such as claims, facts and evidence, terminology and conceptualisations used across and within communities vary heavily, making it hard to assess commonalities and relations of related works and how research in one field may contribute to address problems in another. We survey the state-of-the-art from a range of fields in this interdisciplinary area across a range of research tasks. We assess varying definitions and propose a conceptual model – Open Claims – for claims and related notions that takes into consideration their inherent complexity, distinguishing between their meaning, linguistic representation and context. We also introduce an implementation of this model by using established vocabularies and discuss applications across various tasks related to online discourse analysis.

Enhancing argumentation component classification using contextual language model

Arguments facilitate humans to deliver their ideas. The outcome of the discussion heavily relies on the validity of the argument. If an argument is well-composed, it is more effective to grasp the core idea behind the argument. To grade the argument, machines can be utilized by decomposing into semantic label components. In natural language processing, multiple language models are available to perform this task. It is divided into context-free and contextual models. The majority of previous studies used hand-crafted features to perform argument component classification, while state of the art language models utilize machine learning. The majority of these language models ignore the context in an argument. This research paper aims to analyze whether by including the context in the classification process may improve the accuracy of the language model which will enhance the argumentation mining process as well. The same document corpus is fed into several language models. Word2Vec and GLoVe represent the context free models, while BERT and ELMo as context sensitive language models. Accuracy and time from each model are then compared to determine the importance of context. The result shows that contextual language models are proven to be able to boost classification accuracy by approximately 20%. However, time comes as a cost where contextual models require longer training and prediction time. The benefit from the increase in accuracy outweighs the burden of time. Thus, as a contextual task, argumentation mining is suggested to use contextual model where context must be included to achieve promising results.

Argumentation Mining: Techniques and Emerging Trends

By Argument we mean persuasion of a reason or reasons in support of a claim or evidence. In Artificial Intelligence computational argumentation is the field dealing with computational logic upon which many models of argumentation have been suggested. The goal of Argumentation Mining is to automatically extract structured arguments from the unstructured text. It has the potential of extracting information from web and social media, making it one of the most sought after research area. Some recent advances in computational logic and Machine Learning methods do provide a new insight to the applications for policy making, economic sciences, legal, medical and information technology. Different models have been proposed for argumentation mining with different machine learning methods applied on the argumentation frameworks proposed for this particular mining task. In this survey article we will review the existing systems and applications and will cover the three categories of argumentation models and a comparative table depicting the most frequently applied ML method. This survey paper will also cover the various challenges of the field with the new potential perspectives in this new emerging research area.

SEQUENCE-TO-SEQUENCE LEARNING FOR MOTION-AWARE CLAIM GENERATION

The goal of this research is to generate a motion-aware claim using a deep neural network approach: sequence-to-sequence learning method. A motion-aware claim is a sentence that is logically correlated to the motion while preserving its grammatical structure. Our proposed model generates a motion-aware claim in a form of one sentence and takes motion as the input also in a form of one sentence. We use a publicly available argumentation mining dataset that contains annotated motion and claim data. In this research, we propose a novel approach for argument generation by employing a scheduled sampling strategy to make the model converge faster. The BLEU scores and questionnaire are used to quantitatively assess the model. Our best model achieves 0.175 ± 0.088 BLEU-4 score. Based on the questionnaire results, we can also derive a conclusion that it is hard for the respondents to differentiate between the human-made and the model-generated arguments.

Argument annotation and analysis using deep learning with attention mechanism in Bahasa Indonesia

Argumentation mining is a research field which focuses on sentences in type of argumentation. Argumentative sentences are often used in daily communication and have important role in each decision or conclusion making process. The research objective is to do observation in deep learning utilization combined with attention mechanism for argument annotation and analysis. Argument annotation is argument component classification from certain discourse to several classes. Classes include major claim, claim, premise and non-argumentative. Argument analysis points to argumentation characteristics and validity which are arranged into one topic. One of the analysis is about how to assess whether an established argument is categorized as sufficient or not. Dataset used for argument annotation and analysis is 402 persuasive essays. This data is translated into Bahasa Indonesia (mother tongue of Indonesia) to give overview about how it works with specific language other than English. Several deep learning models such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), and GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) are utilized for argument annotation and analysis while HAN (Hierarchical Attention Network) is utilized only for argument analysis. Attention mechanism is combined with the model as weighted access setter for a better performance. From the whole experiments, combination of deep learning and attention mechanism for argument annotation and analysis arrives in a better result compared with previous research.

Automatic argumentation mining and the role of stance and sentiment

Argumentation mining is a subfield of Computational Linguistics that aims (primarily) at automatically finding arguments and their structural components in natural language text. We provide a short introduction to this field, intended for an audience with a limited computational background. After explaining the subtasks involved in this problem of deriving the structure of arguments, we describe two other applications that are popular in computational linguistics: sentiment analysis and stance detection. From the linguistic viewpoint, they concern the semantics of evaluation in language. In the final part of the paper, we briefly examine the roles that these two tasks play in argumentation mining, both in current practice, and in possible future systems.