Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks

Joe Barrow, Rajiv Jain, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Vlad Morariu, Varun Manjunatha, Douglas Oard, Philip Resnik, Henning Wachsmuth


Abstract
Approaches to computational argumentation tasks such as stance detection and aspect detection have largely focused on the text of independent claims, losing out on potentially valuable context provided by the rest of the collection. We introduce a general approach to these tasks motivated by syntopical reading, a reading process that emphasizes comparing and contrasting viewpoints in order to improve topic understanding. To capture collection-level context, we introduce the syntopical graph, a data structure for linking claims within a collection. A syntopical graph is a typed multi-graph where nodes represent claims and edges represent different possible pairwise relationships, such as entailment, paraphrase, or support. Experiments applying syntopical graphs to the problems of detecting stance and aspects demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in each domain, significantly outperforming approaches that do not utilize collection-level information.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.126
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1583–1595
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.126
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.126
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joe Barrow, Rajiv Jain, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Vlad Morariu, Varun Manjunatha, Douglas Oard, Philip Resnik, and Henning Wachsmuth. 2021. Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1583–1595, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks (Barrow et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.126.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.126.mp4