Modeling Appropriate Language in Argumentation

Timon Ziegenbein, Shahbaz Syed, Felix Lange, Martin Potthast, Henning Wachsmuth


Abstract
Online discussion moderators must make ad-hoc decisions about whether the contributions of discussion participants are appropriate or should be removed to maintain civility. Existing research on offensive language and the resulting tools cover only one aspect among many involved in such decisions. The question of what is considered appropriate in a controversial discussion has not yet been systematically addressed. In this paper, we operationalize appropriate language in argumentation for the first time. In particular, we model appropriateness through the absence of flaws, grounded in research on argument quality assessment, especially in aspects from rhetoric. From these, we derive a new taxonomy of 14 dimensions that determine inappropriate language in online discussions. Building on three argument quality corpora, we then create a corpus of 2191 arguments annotated for the 14 dimensions. Empirical analyses support that the taxonomy covers the concept of appropriateness comprehensively, showing several plausible correlations with argument quality dimensions. Moreover, results of baseline approaches to assessing appropriateness suggest that all dimensions can be modeled computationally on the corpus.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.238
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4344–4363
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.238
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.238
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Timon Ziegenbein, Shahbaz Syed, Felix Lange, Martin Potthast, and Henning Wachsmuth. 2023. Modeling Appropriate Language in Argumentation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4344–4363, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Appropriate Language in Argumentation (Ziegenbein et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.238.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.238.mp4