Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate

Cedric Waterschoot, Ernst van den Hemel, Antal van den Bosch


Abstract
Moderating user comments and promoting healthy understanding is a challenging task, especially in the context of polarized topics such as climate change. We propose a moderation tool to assist moderators in promoting mutual understanding in regard to this topic. The approach is twofold. First, we train classifiers to label incoming posts for the arguments they entail, with a specific focus on minority arguments. We apply active learning to further supplement the training data with rare arguments. Second, we dive deeper into singular arguments and extract the lexical patterns that distinguish each argument from the others. Our findings indicate that climate change arguments form clearly separable clusters in the embedding space. These classes are characterized by their own unique lexical patterns that provide a quick insight in an argument’s key concepts. Additionally, supplementing our training data was necessary for our classifiers to be able to adequately recognize rare arguments. We argue that this detailed rundown of each argument provides insight into where others are coming from. These computational approaches can be part of the toolkit for content moderators and researchers struggling with polarized topics.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.583
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6715–6725
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.583
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cedric Waterschoot, Ernst van den Hemel, and Antal van den Bosch. 2022. Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6715–6725, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate (Waterschoot et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.583.pdf
Code
 cwaterschoot/minority_argumentation