Beyond Recognising Entailment: Formalising Natural Language Inference from an Argumentative Perspective

Ameer Saadat-Yazdi, Nadin Kökciyan


Abstract
In argumentation theory, argument schemes are a characterisation of stereotypical patterns of inference. There has been little work done to develop computational approaches to identify these schemes in natural language. Moreover, advancements in recognizing textual entailment lack a standardized definition of inference, which makes it challenging to compare methods trained on different datasets and rely on the generalisability of their results. In this work, we propose a rigorous approach to align entailment recognition with argumentation theory. Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA), a taxonomy of argument schemes, provides the appropriate framework to unify these two fields. To operationalise the theoretical model, we introduce a tool to assist humans in annotating arguments according to the PTA. Beyond providing insights into non-expert annotator training, we present Kialo-PTA24, the first multi-topic dataset for the PTA. Finally, we benchmark the performance of pre-trained language models on various aspects of argument analysis. Our experiments show that the task of argument canonicalisation poses a significant challenge for state-of-the-art models, suggesting an inability to represent argumentative reasoning and a direction for future investigation.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.520
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9620–9636
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.520
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.520
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ameer Saadat-Yazdi and Nadin Kökciyan. 2024. Beyond Recognising Entailment: Formalising Natural Language Inference from an Argumentative Perspective. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9620–9636, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Recognising Entailment: Formalising Natural Language Inference from an Argumentative Perspective (Saadat-Yazdi & Kökciyan, ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.520.pdf