The empirical quantification of the quality of a contribution to a political discussion is at the heart of deliberative theory, the subdiscipline of political science which investigates decision-making in deliberative democracy. Existing annotation on deliberative quality is time-consuming and carried out by experts, typically resulting in small datasets which also suffer from strong class imbalance. Scaling up such annotations with automatic tools is desirable, but very challenging. We take up this challenge and explore different strategies to improve the prediction of deliberative quality dimensions (justification, common good, interactivity, respect) in a standard dataset. Our results show that simple data augmentation techniques successfully alleviate data imbalance. Classifiers based on linguistic features (textual complexity and sentiment/polarity) and classifiers integrating argument quality annotations (from the argument mining community in NLP) were consistently outperformed by transformer-based models, with or without data augmentation.

Reports of personal experiences or stories can play a crucial role in argumentation, as they represent an immediate and (often) relatable way to back up one’s position with respect to a given topic. They are easy to understand and increase empathy: this makes them powerful in argumentation. The impact of personal reports and stories in argumentation has been studied in the Social Sciences, but it is still largely underexplored in NLP. Our work is the first step towards filling this gap: our goal is to develop robust classifiers to identify documents containing personal experiences and reports. The main challenge is the scarcity of annotated data: our solution is to leverage existing annotations to be able to scale-up the analysis. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we conduct a set of in-domain and cross-domain experiments involving three datasets (two from Argument Mining, one from the Social Sciences), modeling architectures, training setups and fine-tuning options tailored to the involved domains. We show that despite the differences among datasets and annotations, robust cross-domain classification is possible. Second, we employ linear regression for performance mining, identifying performance trends both for overall classification performance and individual classifier predictions.

Human moderation is commonly employed in deliberative contexts (argumentation and discussion targeting a shared decision on an issue relevant to a group, e.g., citizens arguing on how to employ a shared budget). As the scale of discussion enlarges in online settings, the overall discussion quality risks to drop and moderation becomes more important to assist participants in having a cooperative and productive interaction. The scale also makes it more important to employ NLP methods for(semi-)automatic moderation, e.g. to prioritize when moderation is most needed. In this work, we make the first steps towards (semi-)automatic moderation by using state-of-the-art classification models to predict which posts require moderation, showing that while the task is undoubtedly difficult, performance is significantly above baseline. We further investigate whether argument quality is a key indicator of the need for moderation, showing that surprisingly, high quality arguments also trigger moderation. We make our code and data publicly available.

Adjectives such as heavy (as in heavy rain) and windy (as in windy day) provide possible values for the attributes intensity and climate, respectively. The attributes themselves are not overtly realized and are in this sense implicit. While these attributes can be easily inferred by humans, their automatic classification poses a challenging task for computational models. We present the following contributions: (1) We gain new insights into the attribute selection task for German. More specifically, we develop computational models for this task that are able to generalize to unseen data. Moreover, we show that classification accuracy depends, inter alia, on the degree of polysemy of the lexemes involved, on the generalization potential of the training data and on the degree of semantic transparency of the adjective-noun pairs in question. (2) We provide the first resource for computational and linguistic experiments with German adjective-noun pairs that can be used for attribute selection and related tasks. In order to safeguard against unwelcome memorization effects, we present an automatic data augmentation method based on a lexical resource that can increase the size of the training data to a large extent.

This survey builds an interdisciplinary picture of Argument Mining (AM), with a strong focus on its potential to address issues related to Social and Political Science. More specifically, we focus on AM challenges related to its applications to social media and in the multilingual domain, and then proceed to the widely debated notion of argument quality. We propose a novel definition of argument quality which is integrated with that of deliberative quality from the Social Science literature. Under our definition, the quality of a contribution needs to be assessed at multiple levels: the contribution itself, its preceding context, and the consequential effect on the development of the upcoming discourse. The latter has not received the deserved attention within the community. We finally define an application of AM for Social Good: (semi-)automatic moderation, a highly integrative application which (a) represents a challenging testbed for the integrated notion of quality we advocate, (b) allows the empirical quantification of argument/deliberative quality to benefit from the developments in other NLP fields (i.e. hate speech detection, fact checking, debiasing), and (c) has a clearly beneficial potential at the level of its societal thanks to its real-world application (even if extremely ambitious).

In this paper we present the GerCo dataset of adjective-noun collocations for German, such as alter Freund ‘old friend’ and tiefe Liebe ‘deep love’. The annotation has been performed by experts based on the annotation scheme introduced in this paper. The resulting dataset contains 4,732 positive and negative instances of collocations and covers all the 16 semantic classes of adjectives as defined in the German wordnet GermaNet. The dataset can serve as a reliable empirical basis for comparing different theoretical frameworks concerned with collocations or as material for data-driven approaches to the studies of collocations including different machine learning experiments. This paper addresses the latter issue by using the GerCo dataset for evaluating different models on the task of automatic collocation identification. We compare lexical association measures with static and contextualized word embeddings. The experiments show that word embeddings outperform methods based on statistical association measures by a wide margin.