Moritz Plenz


2022

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Data Augmentation for Improving the Prediction of Validity and Novelty of Argumentative Conclusions
Philipp Heinisch | Moritz Plenz | Juri Opitz | Anette Frank | Philipp Cimiano
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

We address the problem of automatically predicting the quality of a conclusion given a set of (textual) premises of an argument, focusing in particular on the task of predicting the validity and novelty of the argumentative conclusion. We propose a multi-task approach that jointly predicts the validity and novelty of the textual conclusion, relying on pre-trained language models fine-tuned on the task. As training data for this task is scarce and costly to obtain, we experimentally investigate the impact of data augmentation approaches for improving the accuracy of prediction compared to a baseline that relies on task-specific data only. We consider the generation of synthetic data as well as the integration of datasets from related argument tasks. We show that especially our synthetic data, combined with class-balancing and instance-specific learning rates, substantially improves classification results (+15.1 points in F1-score). Using only training data retrieved from related datasets by automatically labeling them for validity and novelty, combined with synthetic data, outperforms the baseline by 11.5 points in F1-score.

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Overview of the 2022 Validity and Novelty Prediction Shared Task
Philipp Heinisch | Anette Frank | Juri Opitz | Moritz Plenz | Philipp Cimiano
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

This paper provides an overview of the Argument Validity and Novelty Prediction Shared Task that was organized as part of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining 2022). The task focused on the prediction of the validity and novelty of a conclusion given a textual premise. Validity is defined as the degree to which the conclusion is justified with respect to the given premise. Novelty defines the degree to which the conclusion contains content that is new in relation to the premise. Six groups participated in the task, submitting overall 13 system runs for the subtask of binary classification and 2 system runs for the subtask of relative classification. The results reveal that the task is challenging, with best results obtained for Validity prediction in the range of 75% F1 score, for Novelty prediction of 70% F1 score and for correctly predicting both Validity and Novelty of 45% F1 score. In this paper we summarize the task definition and dataset. We give an overview of the results obtained by the participating systems, as well as insights to be gained from the diverse contributions.