Rob Abbott


2016

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Internet Argument Corpus 2.0: An SQL schema for Dialogic Social Media and the Corpora to go with it
Rob Abbott | Brian Ecker | Pranav Anand | Marilyn Walker
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

Large scale corpora have benefited many areas of research in natural language processing, but until recently, resources for dialogue have lagged behind. Now, with the emergence of large scale social media websites incorporating a threaded dialogue structure, content feedback, and self-annotation (such as stance labeling), there are valuable new corpora available to researchers. In previous work, we released the INTERNET ARGUMENT CORPUS, one of the first larger scale resources available for opinion sharing dialogue. We now release the INTERNET ARGUMENT CORPUS 2.0 (IAC 2.0) in the hope that others will find it as useful as we have. The IAC 2.0 provides more data than IAC 1.0 and organizes it using an extensible, repurposable SQL schema. The database structure in conjunction with the associated code facilitates querying from and combining multiple dialogically structured data sources. The IAC 2.0 schema provides support for forum posts, quotations, markup (bold, italic, etc), and various annotations, including Stanford CoreNLP annotations. We demonstrate the generalizablity of the schema by providing code to import the ConVote corpus.

2012

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A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate
Marilyn Walker | Jean Fox Tree | Pranav Anand | Rob Abbott | Joseph King
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Deliberative, argumentative discourse is an important component of opinion formation, belief revision, and knowledge discovery; it is a cornerstone of modern civil society. Argumentation is productively studied in branches ranging from theoretical artificial intelligence to political rhetoric, but empirical analysis has suffered from a lack of freely available, unscripted argumentative dialogs. This paper presents the Internet Argument Corpus (IAC), a set of 390,704 posts in 11,800 discussions extracted from the online debate site 4forums.com. A 2866 thread/130,206 post extract of the corpus has been manually sided for topic of discussion, and subsets of this topic-labeled extract have been annotated for several dialogic and argumentative markers: degrees of agreement with a previous post, cordiality, audience-direction, combativeness, assertiveness, emotionality of argumentation, and sarcasm. As an application of this resource, the paper closes with a discussion of the relationship between discourse marker pragmatics, agreement, emotionality, and sarcasm in the IAC corpus.

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Stance Classification using Dialogic Properties of Persuasion
Marilyn Walker | Pranav Anand | Rob Abbott | Ricky Grant
Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2011

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How can you say such things?!?: Recognizing Disagreement in Informal Political Argument
Rob Abbott | Marilyn Walker | Pranav Anand | Jean E. Fox Tree | Robeson Bowmani | Joseph King
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language in Social Media (LSM 2011)

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Cats Rule and Dogs Drool!: Classifying Stance in Online Debate
Pranav Anand | Marilyn Walker | Rob Abbott | Jean E. Fox Tree | Robeson Bowmani | Michael Minor
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis (WASSA 2.011)