Multilingual Argument Mining: Datasets and Analysis

Orith Toledo-Ronen, Matan Orbach, Yonatan Bilu, Artem Spector, Noam Slonim


Abstract
The growing interest in argument mining and computational argumentation brings with it a plethora of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks and corresponding datasets. However, as with many other NLU tasks, the dominant language is English, with resources in other languages being few and far between. In this work, we explore the potential of transfer learning using the multilingual BERT model to address argument mining tasks in non-English languages, based on English datasets and the use of machine translation. We show that such methods are well suited for classifying the stance of arguments and detecting evidence, but less so for assessing the quality of arguments, presumably because quality is harder to preserve under translation. In addition, focusing on the translate-train approach, we show how the choice of languages for translation, and the relations among them, affect the accuracy of the resultant model. Finally, to facilitate evaluation of transfer learning on argument mining tasks, we provide a human-generated dataset with more than 10k arguments in multiple languages, as well as machine translation of the English datasets.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.29
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
303–317
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.29
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.29
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Orith Toledo-Ronen, Matan Orbach, Yonatan Bilu, Artem Spector, and Noam Slonim. 2020. Multilingual Argument Mining: Datasets and Analysis. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 303–317, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Argument Mining: Datasets and Analysis (Toledo-Ronen et al., Findings 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.29.pdf