Predicting Moderation of Deliberative Arguments: Is Argument Quality the Key?

Neele Falk, Iman Jundi, Eva Maria Vecchi, Gabriella Lapesa


Abstract
Human moderation is commonly employed in deliberative contexts (argumentation and discussion targeting a shared decision on an issue relevant to a group, e.g., citizens arguing on how to employ a shared budget). As the scale of discussion enlarges in online settings, the overall discussion quality risks to drop and moderation becomes more important to assist participants in having a cooperative and productive interaction. The scale also makes it more important to employ NLP methods for(semi-)automatic moderation, e.g. to prioritize when moderation is most needed. In this work, we make the first steps towards (semi-)automatic moderation by using state-of-the-art classification models to predict which posts require moderation, showing that while the task is undoubtedly difficult, performance is significantly above baseline. We further investigate whether argument quality is a key indicator of the need for moderation, showing that surprisingly, high quality arguments also trigger moderation. We make our code and data publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2021.argmining-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Khalid Al-Khatib, Yufang Hou, Manfred Stede
Venue:
ArgMining
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
133–141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.argmining-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.argmining-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neele Falk, Iman Jundi, Eva Maria Vecchi, and Gabriella Lapesa. 2021. Predicting Moderation of Deliberative Arguments: Is Argument Quality the Key?. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining, pages 133–141, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Moderation of Deliberative Arguments: Is Argument Quality the Key? (Falk et al., ArgMining 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.argmining-1.13.pdf