Darshan Deshpande
2024
Contextualizing Argument Quality Assessment with Relevant Knowledge
Darshan Deshpande
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Zhivar Sourati
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Filip Ilievski
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Fred Morstatter
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Automatic assessment of the quality of arguments has been recognized as a challenging task with significant implications for misinformation and targeted speech. While real-world arguments are tightly anchored in context, existing computational methods analyze their quality in isolation, which affects their accuracy and generalizability. We propose SPARK: a novel method for scoring argument quality based on contextualization via relevant knowledge. We devise four augmentations that leverage large language models to provide feedback, infer hidden assumptions, supply a similar-quality argument, or give a counter-argument. SPARK uses a dual-encoder Transformer architecture to enable the original argument and its augmentation to be considered jointly. Our experiments in both in-domain and zero-shot setups show that SPARK consistently outperforms existing techniques across multiple metrics
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