Belief-based Generation of Argumentative Claims

Milad Alshomary, Wei-Fan Chen, Timon Gurcke, Henning Wachsmuth


Abstract
In this work, we argue that augmenting argument generation technology with the ability to encode beliefs is of twofold. First, it gives more control on the generated arguments leading to better reach for audience. Second, it is one way of modeling the human process of synthesizing arguments. Therefore, we propose the task of belief-based claim generation, and study the research question of how to model and encode a user’s beliefs into a generated argumentative text. To this end, we model users’ beliefs via their stances on big issues, and extend state of the art text generation models with extra input reflecting user’s beliefs. Through an automatic evaluation we show empirical evidence of the applicability to encode beliefs into argumentative text. In our manual evaluation, we highlight that the low effectiveness of our approach stems from the noise produced by the automatic collection of bag-of-words, which was mitigated by removing this noise. The finding of this paper lays the ground work to further investigate the role of beliefs in generating better reaching arguments.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
224–233
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milad Alshomary, Wei-Fan Chen, Timon Gurcke, and Henning Wachsmuth. 2021. Belief-based Generation of Argumentative Claims. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 224–233, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Belief-based Generation of Argumentative Claims (Alshomary et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.17.pdf
Code
 webis-de/eacl21-belief-based-claim-generation