Argue with Me Tersely: Towards Sentence-Level Counter-Argument Generation

Jiayu Lin, Rong Ye, Meng Han, Qi Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xinyu Zhang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei


Abstract
Counter-argument generation—a captivating area in computational linguistics—seeks to craft statements that offer opposing views. While most research has ventured into paragraph-level generation, sentence-level counter-argument generation beckons with its unique constraints and brevity-focused challenges. Furthermore, the diverse nature of counter-arguments poses challenges for evaluating model performance solely based on n-gram-based metrics. In this paper, we present the ArgTersely benchmark for sentence-level counter-argument generation, drawing from a manually annotated dataset from the ChangeMyView debate forum. We also propose Arg-LlaMA for generating high-quality counter-argument. For better evaluation, we trained a BERT-based evaluator Arg-Judge with human preference data. We conducted comparative experiments involving various baselines such as LlaMA, Alpaca, GPT-3, and others. The results show the competitiveness of our proposed framework and evaluator in counter-argument generation tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/amazingljy1206/ArgTersely.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.1039
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16705–16720
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1039
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.1039
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiayu Lin, Rong Ye, Meng Han, Qi Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xinyu Zhang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, and Zhongyu Wei. 2023. Argue with Me Tersely: Towards Sentence-Level Counter-Argument Generation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16705–16720, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Argue with Me Tersely: Towards Sentence-Level Counter-Argument Generation (Lin et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1039.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1039.mp4