Argumentation is ubiquitous in natural language communication, from politics and media to everyday work and private life. Many arguments derive their persuasive power from human values, such as self-directed thought or tolerance, albeit often implicitly. These values are key to understanding the semantics of arguments, as they are generally accepted as justifications for why a particular option is ethically desirable. Can automated systems uncover the values on which an argument draws? To answer this question, 39 teams submitted runs to ValueEval’23. Using a multi-sourced dataset of over 9K arguments, the systems achieved F1-scores up to 0.87 (nature) and over 0.70 for three more of 20 universal value categories. However, many challenges remain, as evidenced by the low peak F1-score of 0.39 for stimulation, hedonism, face, and humility.

This paper studies the (often implicit) human values behind natural language arguments, such as to have freedom of thought or to be broadminded. Values are commonly accepted answers to why some option is desirable in the ethical sense and are thus essential both in real-world argumentation and theoretical argumentation frameworks. However, their large variety has been a major obstacle to modeling them in argument mining. To overcome this obstacle, we contribute an operationalization of human values, namely a multi-level taxonomy with 54 values that is in line with psychological research. Moreover, we provide a dataset of 5270 arguments from four geographical cultures, manually annotated for human values. First experiments with the automatic classification of human values are promising, with F₁-scores up to 0.81 and 0.25 on average.