Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online Discussions

Saumya Sahai, Oana Balalau, Roxana Horincar


Abstract
People debate on a variety of topics on online platforms such as Reddit, or Facebook. Debates can be lengthy, with users exchanging a wealth of information and opinions. However, conversations do not always go smoothly, and users sometimes engage in unsound argumentation techniques to prove a claim. These techniques are called fallacies. Fallacies are persuasive arguments that provide insufficient or incorrect evidence to support the claim. In this paper, we study the most frequent fallacies on Reddit, and we present them using the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. We construct a new annotated dataset of fallacies, using user comments containing fallacy mentions as noisy labels, and cleaning the data via crowdsourcing. Finally, we study the task of classifying fallacies using neural models. We find that generally the models perform better in the presence of conversational context. We have released the data and the code at github.com/sahaisaumya/informal_fallacies.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.53
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
644–657
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.53
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.53
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saumya Sahai, Oana Balalau, and Roxana Horincar. 2021. Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online Discussions. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 644–657, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online Discussions (Sahai et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.53.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.53.mp4
Code
 sahaisaumya/informal_fallacies