Argument Invention from First Principles

Yonatan Bilu, Ariel Gera, Daniel Hershcovich, Benjamin Sznajder, Dan Lahav, Guy Moshkowich, Anael Malet, Assaf Gavron, Noam Slonim


Abstract
Competitive debaters often find themselves facing a challenging task – how to debate a topic they know very little about, with only minutes to prepare, and without access to books or the Internet? What they often do is rely on ”first principles”, commonplace arguments which are relevant to many topics, and which they have refined in past debates. In this work we aim to explicitly define a taxonomy of such principled recurring arguments, and, given a controversial topic, to automatically identify which of these arguments are relevant to the topic. As far as we know, this is the first time that this approach to argument invention is formalized and made explicit in the context of NLP. The main goal of this work is to show that it is possible to define such a taxonomy. While the taxonomy suggested here should be thought of as a ”first attempt” it is nonetheless coherent, covers well the relevant topics and coincides with what professional debaters actually argue in their speeches, and facilitates automatic argument invention for new topics.
Anthology ID:
P19-1097
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1013–1026
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1097
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1097
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yonatan Bilu, Ariel Gera, Daniel Hershcovich, Benjamin Sznajder, Dan Lahav, Guy Moshkowich, Anael Malet, Assaf Gavron, and Noam Slonim. 2019. Argument Invention from First Principles. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1013–1026, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Argument Invention from First Principles (Bilu et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1097.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1097.mp4