How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia

Christine De Kock, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Disagreements are frequently studied from the perspective of either detecting toxicity or analysing argument structure. We propose a framework of dispute tactics which unifies these two perspectives, as well as other dialogue acts which play a role in resolving disputes, such as asking questions and providing clarification. This framework includes a preferential ordering among rebuttal-type tactics, ranging from ad hominem attacks to refuting the central argument. Using this framework, we annotate 213 disagreements (3,865 utterances) from Wikipedia Talk pages. This allows us to investigate research questions around the tactics used in disagreements; for instance, we provide empirical validation of the approach to disagreement recommended by Wikipedia. We develop models for multilabel prediction of dispute tactics in an utterance, achieving the best performance with a transformer-based label powerset model. Adding an auxiliary task to incorporate the ordering of rebuttal tactics further yields a statistically significant increase. Finally, we show that these annotations can be used to provide useful additional signals to improve performance on the task of predicting escalation.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.252
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3824–3837
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.252
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.252
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christine De Kock and Andreas Vlachos. 2022. How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3824–3837, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia (De Kock & Vlachos, EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.252.pdf