Classification and Clustering of Arguments with Contextualized Word Embeddings

Nils Reimers, Benjamin Schiller, Tilman Beck, Johannes Daxenberger, Christian Stab, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
We experiment with two recent contextualized word embedding methods (ELMo and BERT) in the context of open-domain argument search. For the first time, we show how to leverage the power of contextualized word embeddings to classify and cluster topic-dependent arguments, achieving impressive results on both tasks and across multiple datasets. For argument classification, we improve the state-of-the-art for the UKP Sentential Argument Mining Corpus by 20.8 percentage points and for the IBM Debater - Evidence Sentences dataset by 7.4 percentage points. For the understudied task of argument clustering, we propose a pre-training step which improves by 7.8 percentage points over strong baselines on a novel dataset, and by 12.3 percentage points for the Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) Corpus.
Anthology ID:
P19-1054
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
567–578
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1054
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1054
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nils Reimers, Benjamin Schiller, Tilman Beck, Johannes Daxenberger, Christian Stab, and Iryna Gurevych. 2019. Classification and Clustering of Arguments with Contextualized Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 567–578, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Classification and Clustering of Arguments with Contextualized Word Embeddings (Reimers et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1054.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1054.Supplementary.pdf
Code
 UKPLab/acl2019-BERT-argument-classification-and-clustering +  additional community code