@inproceedings{saadat-yazdi-kokciyan-2024-beyond,
    title = "Beyond Recognising Entailment: Formalising Natural Language Inference from an Argumentative Perspective",
    author = {Saadat-Yazdi, Ameer  and
      K{\"o}kciyan, Nadin},
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.acl-long.520/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.520",
    pages = "9620--9636",
    abstract = "In argumentation theory, argument schemes are a characterisation of stereotypical patterns of inference. There has been little work done to develop computational approaches to identify these schemes in natural language. Moreover, advancements in recognizing textual entailment lack a standardized definition of inference, which makes it challenging to compare methods trained on different datasets and rely on the generalisability of their results. In this work, we propose a rigorous approach to align entailment recognition with argumentation theory. Wagemans' Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA), a taxonomy of argument schemes, provides the appropriate framework to unify these two fields. To operationalise the theoretical model, we introduce a tool to assist humans in annotating arguments according to the PTA. Beyond providing insights into non-expert annotator training, we present Kialo-PTA24, the first multi-topic dataset for the PTA. Finally, we benchmark the performance of pre-trained language models on various aspects of argument analysis. Our experiments show that the task of argument canonicalisation poses a significant challenge for state-of-the-art models, suggesting an inability to represent argumentative reasoning and a direction for future investigation."
}