Boundary Detection and Categorization of Argument Aspects via Supervised Learning

Mattes Ruckdeschel, Gregor Wiedemann


Abstract
Aspect-based argument mining (ABAM) is the task of automatic _detection_ and _categorization_ of argument aspects, i.e. the parts of an argumentative text that contain the issue-specific key rationale for its conclusion. From empirical data, overlapping but not congruent sets of aspect categories can be derived for different topics. So far, two supervised approaches to detect aspect boundaries, and a smaller number of unsupervised clustering approaches to categorize groups of similar aspects have been proposed. With this paper, we introduce the Argument Aspect Corpus (AAC) that contains token-level annotations of aspects in 3,547 argumentative sentences from three highly debated topics. This dataset enables both the supervised learning of boundaries and categorization of argument aspects. During the design of our annotation process, we noticed that it is not clear from the outset at which contextual unit aspects should be coded. We, thus, experiment with classification at the token, chunk, and sentence level granularity. Our finding is that the chunk level provides the most useful information for applications. At the same time, it produces the best performing results in our tested supervised learning setups.
Anthology ID:
2022.argmining-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Online and in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Gabriella Lapesa, Jodi Schneider, Yohan Jo, Sougata Saha
Venue:
ArgMining
SIG:
Publisher:
International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
126–136
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.argmining-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mattes Ruckdeschel and Gregor Wiedemann. 2022. Boundary Detection and Categorization of Argument Aspects via Supervised Learning. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining, pages 126–136, Online and in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Boundary Detection and Categorization of Argument Aspects via Supervised Learning (Ruckdeschel & Wiedemann, ArgMining 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.argmining-1.12.pdf
Code
 leibniz-hbi/argument-aspect-corpus-v1