Towards an argumentative content search engine using weak supervision

Ran Levy, Ben Bogin, Shai Gretz, Ranit Aharonov, Noam Slonim


Abstract
Searching for sentences containing claims in a large text corpus is a key component in developing an argumentative content search engine. Previous works focused on detecting claims in a small set of documents or within documents enriched with argumentative content. However, pinpointing relevant claims in massive unstructured corpora, received little attention. A step in this direction was taken in (Levy et al. 2017), where the authors suggested using a weak signal to develop a relatively strict query for claim–sentence detection. Here, we leverage this work to define weak signals for training DNNs to obtain significantly greater performance. This approach allows to relax the query and increase the potential coverage. Our results clearly indicate that the system is able to successfully generalize from the weak signal, outperforming previously reported results in terms of both precision and coverage. Finally, we adapt our system to solve a recent argument mining task of identifying argumentative sentences in Web texts retrieved from heterogeneous sources, and obtain F1 scores comparable to the supervised baseline.
Anthology ID:
C18-1176
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2066–2081
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1176
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ran Levy, Ben Bogin, Shai Gretz, Ranit Aharonov, and Noam Slonim. 2018. Towards an argumentative content search engine using weak supervision. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2066–2081, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards an argumentative content search engine using weak supervision (Levy et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1176.pdf