arXiv subjects

Henning Wachsmuth

Publications and source records attributed to Henning Wachsmuth.

44 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Argument from Old Man's View: Assessing Social Bias in Argumentation

Social bias in language - towards genders, ethnicities, ages, and other social groups - poses a problem with ethical impact for many NLP applications. Recent research has shown that machine learning models trained on respective data may not only adopt, but even amplify the bias. So far, however, little attention has been paid to bias in computational argumentation. In this paper, we study the existence of social biases in large English debate portals. In particular, we train word embedding models on portal-specific corpora and systematically evaluate their bias using WEAT, an existing metric to measure bias in word embeddings. In a word co-occurrence analysis, we then investigate causes of bias. The results suggest that all tested debate corpora contain unbalanced and biased data, mostly in favor of male people with European-American names. Our empirical insights contribute towards an understanding of bias in argumentative data sources.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Semi-Supervised Cleansing of Web Argument Corpora

Debate portals and similar web platforms constitute one of the main text sources in computational argumentation research and its applications. While the corpora built upon these sources are rich of argumentatively relevant content and structure, they also include text that is irrelevant, or even detrimental, to their purpose. In this paper, we present a precision-oriented approach to detecting such irrelevant text in a semi-supervised way. Given a few seed examples, the approach automatically learns basic lexical patterns of relevance and irrelevance and then incrementally bootstraps new patterns from sentences matching the patterns. In the existing args.me corpus with 400k argumentative texts, our approach detects almost 87k irrelevant sentences, at a precision of 0.97 according to manual evaluation. With low effort, the approach can be adapted to other web argument corpora, providing a generic way to improve corpus quality.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Intrinsic Quality Assessment of Arguments

Several quality dimensions of natural language arguments have been investigated. Some are likely to be reflected in linguistic features (e.g., an argument's arrangement), whereas others depend on context (e.g., relevance) or topic knowledge (e.g., acceptability). In this paper, we study the intrinsic computational assessment of 15 dimensions, i.e., only learning from an argument's text. In systematic experiments with eight feature types on an existing corpus, we observe moderate but significant learning success for most dimensions. Rhetorical quality seems hardest to assess, and subjectivity features turn out strong, although length bias in the corpus impedes full validity. We also find that human assessors differ more clearly to each other than to our approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Detecting Media Bias in News Articles using Gaussian Bias Distributions

Media plays an important role in shaping public opinion. Biased media can influence people in undesirable directions and hence should be unmasked as such. We observe that featurebased and neural text classification approaches which rely only on the distribution of low-level lexical information fail to detect media bias. This weakness becomes most noticeable for articles on new events, where words appear in new contexts and hence their "bias predictiveness" is unclear. In this paper, we therefore study how second-order information about biased statements in an article helps to improve detection effectiveness. In particular, we utilize the probability distributions of the frequency, positions, and sequential order of lexical and informational sentence-level bias in a Gaussian Mixture Model. On an existing media bias dataset, we find that the frequency and positions of biased statements strongly impact article-level bias, whereas their exact sequential order is secondary. Using a standard model for sentence-level bias detection, we provide empirical evidence that article-level bias detectors that use second-order information clearly outperform those without.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Analyzing Political Bias and Unfairness in News Articles at Different Levels of Granularity

Media organizations bear great reponsibility because of their considerable influence on shaping beliefs and positions of our society. Any form of media can contain overly biased content, e.g., by reporting on political events in a selective or incomplete manner. A relevant question hence is whether and how such form of imbalanced news coverage can be exposed. The research presented in this paper addresses not only the automatic detection of bias but goes one step further in that it explores how political bias and unfairness are manifested linguistically. In this regard we utilize a new corpus of 6964 news articles with labels derived from adfontesmedia.com and develop a neural model for bias assessment. By analyzing this model on article excerpts, we find insightful bias patterns at different levels of text granularity, from single words to the whole article discourse.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Wikipedia Text Reuse: Within and Without

We study text reuse related to Wikipedia at scale by compiling the first corpus of text reuse cases within Wikipedia as well as without (i.e., reuse of Wikipedia text in a sample of the Common Crawl). To discover reuse beyond verbatim copy and paste, we employ state-of-the-art text reuse detection technology, scaling it for the first time to process the entire Wikipedia as part of a distributed retrieval pipeline. We further report on a pilot analysis of the 100 million reuse cases inside, and the 1.6 million reuse cases outside Wikipedia that we discovered. Text reuse inside Wikipedia gives rise to new tasks such as article template induction, fixing quality flaws due to inconsistencies arising from asynchronous editing of reused passages, or complementing Wikipedia's ontology. Text reuse outside Wikipedia yields a tangible metric for the emerging field of quantifying Wikipedia's influence on the web. To foster future research into these tasks, and for reproducibility's sake, the Wikipedia text reuse corpus and the retrieval pipeline are made freely available.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

Reasoning is a crucial part of natural language argumentation. To comprehend an argument, one must analyze its warrant, which explains why its claim follows from its premises. As arguments are highly contextualized, warrants are usually presupposed and left implicit. Thus, the comprehension does not only require language understanding and logic skills, but also depends on common sense. In this paper we develop a methodology for reconstructing warrants systematically. We operationalize it in a scalable crowdsourcing process, resulting in a freely licensed dataset with warrants for 2k authentic arguments from news comments. On this basis, we present a new challenging task, the argument reasoning comprehension task. Given an argument with a claim and a premise, the goal is to choose the correct implicit warrant from two options. Both warrants are plausible and lexically close, but lead to contradicting claims. A solution to this task will define a substantial step towards automatic warrant reconstruction. However, experiments with several neural attention and language models reveal that current approaches do not suffice.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation

Arguing without committing a fallacy is one of the main requirements of an ideal debate. But even when debating rules are strictly enforced and fallacious arguments punished, arguers often lapse into attacking the opponent by an ad hominem argument. As existing research lacks solid empirical investigation of the typology of ad hominem arguments as well as their potential causes, this paper fills this gap by (1) performing several large-scale annotation studies, (2) experimenting with various neural architectures and validating our working hypotheses, such as controversy or reasonableness, and (3) providing linguistic insights into triggers of ad hominem using explainable neural network architectures.

cs.CL↗