Tamar Lavee


2021

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Supporting Spanish Writers using Automated Feedback
Aoife Cahill | James Bruno | James Ramey | Gilmar Ayala Meneses | Ian Blood | Florencia Tolentino | Tamar Lavee | Slava Andreyev
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations

We present a tool that provides automated feedback to students studying Spanish writing. The feedback is given for four categories: topic development, coherence, writing conventions, and essay organization. The tool is made freely available via a Google Docs add-on. A small user study with third-level students in Mexico shows that students found the tool generally helpful and that most of them plan to continue using it as they work to improve their writing skills.

2019

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A Dataset of General-Purpose Rebuttal
Matan Orbach | Yonatan Bilu | Ariel Gera | Yoav Kantor | Lena Dankin | Tamar Lavee | Lili Kotlerman | Shachar Mirkin | Michal Jacovi | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

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.

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Crowd-sourcing annotation of complex NLU tasks: A case study of argumentative content annotation
Tamar Lavee | Lili Kotlerman | Matan Orbach | Yonatan Bilu | Michal Jacovi | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Aggregating and Analysing Crowdsourced Annotations for NLP

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.

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Towards Effective Rebuttal: Listening Comprehension Using Corpus-Wide Claim Mining
Tamar Lavee | Matan Orbach | Lili Kotlerman | Yoav Kantor | Shai Gretz | Lena Dankin | Michal Jacovi | Yonatan Bilu | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Argument Mining

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.

2018

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Listening Comprehension over Argumentative Content
Shachar Mirkin | Guy Moshkowich | Matan Orbach | Lili Kotlerman | Yoav Kantor | Tamar Lavee | Michal Jacovi | Yonatan Bilu | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

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A Recorded Debating Dataset
Shachar Mirkin | Michal Jacovi | Tamar Lavee | Hong-Kwang Kuo | Samuel Thomas | Leslie Sager | Lili Kotlerman | Elad Venezian | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2014

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A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Detection of Claims and Evidence in the Context of Controversial Topics
Ehud Aharoni | Anatoly Polnarov | Tamar Lavee | Daniel Hershcovich | Ran Levy | Ruty Rinott | Dan Gutfreund | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

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Claims on demand – an initial demonstration of a system for automatic detection and polarity identification of context dependent claims in massive corpora
Noam Slonim | Ehud Aharoni | Carlos Alzate | Roy Bar-Haim | Yonatan Bilu | Lena Dankin | Iris Eiron | Daniel Hershcovich | Shay Hummel | Mitesh Khapra | Tamar Lavee | Ran Levy | Paul Matchen | Anatoly Polnarov | Vikas Raykar | Ruty Rinott | Amrita Saha | Naama Zwerdling | David Konopnicki | Dan Gutfreund
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations