Mining, Assessing, and Improving Arguments in NLP and the Social Sciences

Tutorial @ EACL, Dubrovnik, May 5th 2023, 9:00 - 18.00

Computational argumentation is an interdisciplinary research field, connecting NLP to other disciplines such as the social sciences. This tutorial will focus on a task that recently got into the center of attention, argument quality assessment: what makes an argument good or bad?

The tutorial will be structured along three coordinates:

the notions of argument quality across disciplines: how do we recognize good and bad arguments?
the modeling of subjectivity: who argues to whom; what are their beliefs?
the generation of improved arguments: what makes an argument better?

A key feature of this tutorial is its interactive nature: We will involve the participants in two annotation studies on the assessment and the improvement of quality, and we will encourage them to reflect on the challenges and potential of these tasks.

Instructors

Gabriella Lapesa, University of Stuttgart

Eva Maria Vecchi, University of Stuttgart

Serena Villata, Laboratoire I3S, CNRS, Sophia Antipolis, France

Henning Wachsmuth, Leibniz University Hannover

Schedule

Session 1 - Mining arguments [slides]
Session 2 - The NLP perspective: Argument Quality [slides]
Session 3 - Interactive session: Argument Quality [slides]
Session 4 - The Social Science perspective: Deliberative Quality [slides]
Session 5 - Modeling Subjectivity [slides]
Session 6 - Interactive session: Improving arguments [slides]
Session 7 - Generation methods for improving arguments [slides]
Session 8 - Wrapping up [slides]