Eric Massip Cano
2019
Computational Ad Hominem Detection
Pieter Delobelle
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Murilo Cunha
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Eric Massip Cano
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Jeroen Peperkamp
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Bettina Berendt
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Fallacies like the personal attack—also known as the ad hominem attack—are introduced in debates as an easy win, even though they provide no rhetorical contribution. Although their importance in argumentation mining is acknowledged, automated mining and analysis is still lacking. We show TF-IDF approaches are insufficient to detect the ad hominem attack. Therefore we present a machine learning approach for information extraction, which has a recall of 80% for a social media data source. We also demonstrate our approach with an application that uses online learning.