How to Handle Different Types of Out-of-Distribution Scenarios in Computational Argumentation? A Comprehensive and Fine-Grained Field Study

Andreas Waldis, Yufang Hou, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
The advent of pre-trained Language Models (LMs) has markedly advanced natural language processing, but their efficacy in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios remains a significant challenge. Computational argumentation (CA), modeling human argumentation processes, is a field notably impacted by these challenges because complex annotation schemes and high annotation costs naturally lead to resources barely covering the multiplicity of available text sources and topics. Due to this data scarcity, generalization to data from uncovered covariant distributions is a common challenge for CA tasks like stance detection or argument classification. This work systematically assesses LMs’ capabilities for such OOD scenarios. While previous work targets specific OOD types like topic shifts or OOD uniformly, we address three prevalent OOD scenarios in CA: topic shift, domain shift, and language shift. Our findings challenge the previously asserted general superiority of in-context learning (ICL) for OOD. We find that the efficacy of such learning paradigms varies with the type of OOD. Specifically, while ICL excels for domain shifts, prompt-based fine-tuning surpasses for topic shifts. To sum up, we navigate the heterogeneity of OOD scenarios in CA and empirically underscore the potential of base-sized LMs in overcoming these challenges.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.795
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14878–14898
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.795
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.795
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andreas Waldis, Yufang Hou, and Iryna Gurevych. 2024. How to Handle Different Types of Out-of-Distribution Scenarios in Computational Argumentation? A Comprehensive and Fine-Grained Field Study. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14878–14898, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How to Handle Different Types of Out-of-Distribution Scenarios in Computational Argumentation? A Comprehensive and Fine-Grained Field Study (Waldis et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.795.pdf