Finding evidence is of vital importance in research as well as fact checking and an evidence detection method would be useful in speeding up this process. However, when addressing a new topic there is no training data and there are two approaches to get started. One could use large amounts of out-of-domain data to train a state-of-the-art method, or to use the small data that a person creates while working on the topic. In this paper, we address this problem in two steps. First, by simulating users who read source documents and label sentences they can use as evidence, thereby creating small amounts of training data for an interactively trained evidence detection model; and second, by comparing such an interactively trained model against a pre-trained model that has been trained on large out-of-domain data. We found that an interactively trained model not only often out-performs a state-of-the-art model but also requires significantly lower amounts of computational resources. Therefore, especially when computational resources are scarce, e.g. no GPU available, training a smaller model on the fly is preferable to training a well generalising but resource hungry out-of-domain model.

Argument mining is a core technology for enabling argument search in large corpora. However, most current approaches fall short when applied to heterogeneous texts. In this paper, we present an argument retrieval system capable of retrieving sentential arguments for any given controversial topic. By analyzing the highest-ranked results extracted from Web sources, we found that our system covers 89% of arguments found in expert-curated lists of arguments from an online debate portal, and also identifies additional valid arguments.