Node Placement in Argument Maps: Modeling Unidirectional Relations in High & Low-Resource Scenarios

Iman Jundi, Neele Falk, Eva Maria Vecchi, Gabriella Lapesa


Abstract
Argument maps structure discourse into nodes in a tree with each node being an argument that supports or opposes its parent argument. This format is more comprehensible and less redundant compared to an unstructured one. Exploring those maps and maintaining their structure by placing new arguments under suitable parents is more challenging for users with huge maps that are typical in online discussions. To support those users, we introduce the task of node placement: suggesting candidate nodes as parents for a new contribution. We establish an upper-bound of human performance, and conduct experiments with models of various sizes and training strategies. We experiment with a selection of maps from Kialo, drawn from a heterogeneous set of domains. Based on an annotation study, we highlight the ambiguity of the task that makes it challenging for both humans and models. We examine the unidirectional relation between tree nodes and show that encoding a node into different embeddings for each of the parent and child cases improves performance. We further show the few-shot effectiveness of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.322
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:
5854–5876
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.322
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.322
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iman Jundi, Neele Falk, Eva Maria Vecchi, and Gabriella Lapesa. 2023. Node Placement in Argument Maps: Modeling Unidirectional Relations in High & Low-Resource Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5854–5876, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Node Placement in Argument Maps: Modeling Unidirectional Relations in High & Low-Resource Scenarios (Jundi et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.322.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.322.mp4