Targeted Sentiment Analysis (TSA) is a central task for generating insights from consumer reviews. Such content is extremely diverse, with sites like Amazon or Yelp containing reviews on products and businesses from many different domains. A real-world TSA system should gracefully handle that diversity. This can be achieved by a multi-domain model – one that is robust to the domain of the analyzed texts, and performs well on various domains. To address this scenario, we present a multi-domain TSA system based on augmenting a given training set with diverse weak labels from assorted domains. These are obtained through self-training on the Yelp reviews corpus. Extensive experiments with our approach on three evaluation datasets across different domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. We further analyze how restrictions imposed on the available labeled data affect the performance, and compare the proposed method to the costly alternative of manually gathering diverse TSA labeled data. Our results and analysis show that our approach is a promising step towards a practical domain-robust TSA system.

The tutorial focuses on Debating Technologies, a sub-field of computational argumentation defined as “computational technologies developed directly to enhance, support, and engage with human debating” (Gurevych et al., 2016). A recent milestone in this field is Project Debater, which was revealed in 2019 as the first AI system that can debate human experts on complex topics. Project Debater is the third in the series of IBM Research AI’s grand challenges, following Deep Blue and Watson. It has been developed for over six years by a large team of researchers and engineers, and its live demonstration in February 2019 received massive media attention. This research effort has resulted in more than 50 scientific papers to date, and many datasets freely available for research purposes. We discuss the scientific challenges that arise when building such a system, including argument mining, argument quality assessment, stance classification, principled argument detection, narrative generation, and rebutting a human opponent. Many of the underlying capabilities of Project Debater have been made freely available for academic research, and the tutorial will include a detailed explanation of how to use and leverage these tools. In addition to discussing individual components, the tutorial also provides a holistic view of a debating system. Such a view is largely missing in the academic literature, where each paper typically addresses a specific problem in isolation. We present a complete pipeline of a debating system, and discuss the information flow and the interaction between the various components. Finally, we discuss practical applications and future challenges of debating technologies.

Current TSA evaluation in a cross-domain setup is restricted to the small set of review domains available in existing datasets. Such an evaluation is limited, and may not reflect true performance on sites like Amazon or Yelp that host diverse reviews from many domains. To address this gap, we present YASO – a new TSA evaluation dataset of open-domain user reviews. YASO contains 2,215 English sentences from dozens of review domains, annotated with target terms and their sentiment. Our analysis verifies the reliability of these annotations, and explores the characteristics of the collected data. Benchmark results using five contemporary TSA systems show there is ample room for improvement on this challenging new dataset. YASO is available at https://github.com/IBM/yaso-tsa.

An educated and informed consumption of media content has become a challenge in modern times. With the shift from traditional news outlets to social media and similar venues, a major concern is that readers are becoming encapsulated in “echo chambers” and may fall prey to fake news and disinformation, lacking easy access to dissenting views. We suggest a novel task aiming to alleviate some of these concerns – that of detecting articles that most effectively counter the arguments – and not just the stance – made in a given text. We study this problem in the context of debate speeches. Given such a speech, we aim to identify, from among a set of speeches on the same topic and with an opposing stance, the ones that directly counter it. We provide a large dataset of 3,685 such speeches (in English), annotated for this relation, which hopefully would be of general interest to the NLP community. We explore several algorithms addressing this task, and while some are successful, all fall short of expert human performance, suggesting room for further research. All data collected during this work is freely available for research.

The growing interest in argument mining and computational argumentation brings with it a plethora of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks and corresponding datasets. However, as with many other NLU tasks, the dominant language is English, with resources in other languages being few and far between. In this work, we explore the potential of transfer learning using the multilingual BERT model to address argument mining tasks in non-English languages, based on English datasets and the use of machine translation. We show that such methods are well suited for classifying the stance of arguments and detecting evidence, but less so for assessing the quality of arguments, presumably because quality is harder to preserve under translation. In addition, focusing on the translate-train approach, we show how the choice of languages for translation, and the relations among them, affect the accuracy of the resultant model. Finally, to facilitate evaluation of transfer learning on argument mining tasks, we provide a human-generated dataset with more than 10k arguments in multiple languages, as well as machine translation of the English datasets.

In Natural Language Understanding, the task of response generation is usually focused on responses to short texts, such as tweets or a turn in a dialog. Here we present a novel task of producing a critical response to a long argumentative text, and suggest a method based on general rebuttal arguments to address it. We do this in the context of the recently-suggested task of listening comprehension over argumentative content: given a speech on some specified topic, and a list of relevant arguments, the goal is to determine which of the arguments appear in the speech. The general rebuttals we describe here (in English) overcome the need for topic-specific arguments to be provided, by proving to be applicable for a large set of topics. This allows creating responses beyond the scope of topics for which specific arguments are available. All data collected during this work is freely available for research.

Recent advancements in machine reading and listening comprehension involve the annotation of long texts. Such tasks are typically time consuming, making crowd-annotations an attractive solution, yet their complexity often makes such a solution unfeasible. In particular, a major concern is that crowd annotators may be tempted to skim through long texts, and answer questions without reading thoroughly. We present a case study of adapting this type of task to the crowd. The task is to identify claims in a several minute long debate speech. We show that sentence-by-sentence annotation does not scale and that labeling only a subset of sentences is insufficient. Instead, we propose a scheme for effectively performing the full, complex task with crowd annotators, allowing the collection of large scale annotated datasets. We believe that the encountered challenges and pitfalls, as well as lessons learned, are relevant in general when collecting data for large scale natural language understanding (NLU) tasks.

Engaging in a live debate requires, among other things, the ability to effectively rebut arguments claimed by your opponent. In particular, this requires identifying these arguments. Here, we suggest doing so by automatically mining claims from a corpus of news articles containing billions of sentences, and searching for them in a given speech. This raises the question of whether such claims indeed correspond to those made in spoken speeches. To this end, we collected a large dataset of 400 speeches in English discussing 200 controversial topics, mined claims for each topic, and asked annotators to identify the mined claims mentioned in each speech. Results show that in the vast majority of speeches debaters indeed make use of such claims. In addition, we present several baselines for the automatic detection of mined claims in speeches, forming the basis for future work. All collected data is freely available for research.

This paper presents a task for machine listening comprehension in the argumentation domain and a corresponding dataset in English. We recorded 200 spontaneous speeches arguing for or against 50 controversial topics. For each speech, we formulated a question, aimed at confirming or rejecting the occurrence of potential arguments in the speech. Labels were collected by listening to the speech and marking which arguments were mentioned by the speaker. We applied baseline methods addressing the task, to be used as a benchmark for future work over this dataset. All data used in this work is freely available for research.