Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments

Johannes Kiesel, Milad Alshomary, Nicolas Handke, Xiaoni Cai, Henning Wachsmuth, Benno Stein


Abstract
This paper studies the (often implicit) human values behind natural language arguments, such as to have freedom of thought or to be broadminded. Values are commonly accepted answers to why some option is desirable in the ethical sense and are thus essential both in real-world argumentation and theoretical argumentation frameworks. However, their large variety has been a major obstacle to modeling them in argument mining. To overcome this obstacle, we contribute an operationalization of human values, namely a multi-level taxonomy with 54 values that is in line with psychological research. Moreover, we provide a dataset of 5270 arguments from four geographical cultures, manually annotated for human values. First experiments with the automatic classification of human values are promising, with F1-scores up to 0.81 and 0.25 on average.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.306
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4459–4471
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.306
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.306
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Johannes Kiesel, Milad Alshomary, Nicolas Handke, Xiaoni Cai, Henning Wachsmuth, and Benno Stein. 2022. Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4459–4471, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments (Kiesel et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.306.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.306.mp4
Code
 webis-de/acl-22