Conclusion-based Counter-Argument Generation

Milad Alshomary, Henning Wachsmuth


Abstract
In real-world debates, the most common way to counter an argument is to reason against its main point, that is, its conclusion. Existing work on the automatic generation of natural language counter-arguments does not address the relation to the conclusion, possibly because many arguments leave their conclusion implicit. In this paper, we hypothesize that the key to effective counter-argument generation is to explicitly model the argument’s conclusion and to ensure that the stance of the generated counter is opposite to that conclusion. In particular, we propose a multitask approach that jointly learns to generate both the conclusion and the counter of an input argument. The approach employs a stance-based ranking component that selects the counter from a diverse set of generated candidates whose stance best opposes the generated conclusion. In both automatic and manual evaluation, we provide evidence that our approach generates more relevant and stance-adhering counters than strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.67
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
957–967
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.67
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.67
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milad Alshomary and Henning Wachsmuth. 2023. Conclusion-based Counter-Argument Generation. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 957–967, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conclusion-based Counter-Argument Generation (Alshomary & Wachsmuth, EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.67.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.67.mp4