Reproduction and Revival of the Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task

João António Rodrigues, Ruben Branco, João Silva, António Branco


Abstract
Reproduction of scientific findings is essential for scientific development across all scientific disciplines and reproducing results of previous works is a basic requirement for validating the hypothesis and conclusions put forward by them. This paper reports on the scientific reproduction of several systems addressing the Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task of SemEval2018. Given a recent publication that pointed out spurious statistical cues in the data set used in the shared task, and that produced a revised version of it, we also evaluated the reproduced systems with this new data set. The exercise reported here shows that, in general, the reproduction of these systems is successful with scores in line with those reported in SemEval2018. However, the performance scores are worst than those, and even below the random baseline, when the reproduced systems are run over the revised data set expunged from data artifacts. This demonstrates that this task is actually a much harder challenge than what could have been perceived from the inflated, close to human-level performance scores obtained with the data set used in SemEval2018. This calls for a revival of this task as there is much room for improvement until systems may come close to the upper bound provided by human performance.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.622
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5055–5064
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.622
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
João António Rodrigues, Ruben Branco, João Silva, and António Branco. 2020. Reproduction and Revival of the Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5055–5064, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Reproduction and Revival of the Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task (António Rodrigues et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.622.pdf