Chris Reed

Also published as: C. Reed


2022

pdf bib
The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate
Zlata Kikteva | Kamila Gorska | Wassiliki Siskou | Annette Hautli-Janisz | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

Building on the recent results of a study into the roles that are played by questions in argumentative dialogue (Hautli-Janisz et al.,2022a), we expand the analysis to investigate a newly released corpus that constitutes the largest extant corpus of closely annotated debate. Questions play a critical role in driving dialogical discourse forward; in combative or critical discursive environments, they not only provide a range of discourse management techniques, they also scaffold the semantic structure of the positions that interlocutors develop. The boundaries, however, between providing substantive answers to questions, merely responding to questions, and evading questions entirely, are fuzzy and the way in which answers, responses and evasions affect the subsequent development of dialogue and argumentation structure are poorly understood. In this paper, we explore how questions have ramifications on the large-scale structure of a debate using as our substrate the BBC television programme Question Time, the foremost topical debate show in the UK. Analysis of the data demonstrates not only that questioning plays a particularly prominent role in such debate, but also that its repercussions can reverberate through a discourse.

pdf bib
Disagreement Space in Argument Analysis
Annette Hautli-Janisz | Ella Schad | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP @LREC2022

For a highly subjective task such as recognising speaker intention and argumentation, the traditional way of generating gold standards is to aggregate a number of labels into a single one. However, this seriously neglects the underlying richness that characterises discourse and argumentation and is also, in some cases, straightforwardly impossible. In this paper, we present QT30nonaggr, the first corpus of non-aggregated argument annotation, which will be openly available upon publication. QT30nonaggr encompasses 10% of QT30, the largest corpus of dialogical argumentation and analysed broadcast political debate currently available with 30 episodes of BBC’s ‘Question Time’ from 2020 and 2021. Based on a systematic and detailed investigation of annotation judgements across all steps of the annotation process, we structure the disagreement space with a taxonomy of the types of label disagreements in argument annotation, identifying the categories of annotation errors, fuzziness and ambiguity.

pdf bib
QT30: A Corpus of Argument and Conflict in Broadcast Debate
Annette Hautli-Janisz | Zlata Kikteva | Wassiliki Siskou | Kamila Gorska | Ray Becker | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Broadcast political debate is a core pillar of democracy: it is the public’s easiest access to opinions that shape policies and enables the general public to make informed choices. With QT30, we present the largest corpus of analysed dialogical argumentation ever created (19,842 utterances, 280,000 words) and also the largest corpus of analysed broadcast political debate to date, using 30 episodes of BBC’s ‘Question Time’ from 2020 and 2021. Question Time is the prime institution in UK broadcast political debate and features questions from the public on current political issues, which are responded to by a weekly panel of five figures of UK politics and society. QT30 is highly argumentative and combines language of well-versed political rhetoric with direct, often combative, justification-seeking of the general public. QT30 is annotated with Inference Anchoring Theory, a framework well-known in argument mining, which encodes the way arguments and conflicts are created and reacted to in dialogical settings. The resource is freely available at http://corpora.aifdb.org/qt30.

2021

pdf bib
Knowledge-Enhanced Evidence Retrieval for Counterargument Generation
Yohan Jo | Haneul Yoo | JinYeong Bak | Alice Oh | Chris Reed | Eduard Hovy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Finding counterevidence to statements is key to many tasks, including counterargument generation. We build a system that, given a statement, retrieves counterevidence from diverse sources on the Web. At the core of this system is a natural language inference (NLI) model that determines whether a candidate sentence is valid counterevidence or not. Most NLI models to date, however, lack proper reasoning abilities necessary to find counterevidence that involves complex inference. Thus, we present a knowledge-enhanced NLI model that aims to handle causality- and example-based inference by incorporating knowledge graphs. Our NLI model outperforms baselines for NLI tasks, especially for instances that require the targeted inference. In addition, this NLI model further improves the counterevidence retrieval system, notably finding complex counterevidence better.

pdf bib
Classifying Argumentative Relations Using Logical Mechanisms and Argumentation Schemes
Yohan Jo | Seojin Bang | Chris Reed | Eduard Hovy
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

While argument mining has achieved significant success in classifying argumentative relations between statements (support, attack, and neutral), we have a limited computational understanding of logical mechanisms that constitute those relations. Most recent studies rely on black-box models, which are not as linguistically insightful as desired. On the other hand, earlier studies use rather simple lexical features, missing logical relations between statements. To overcome these limitations, our work classifies argumentative relations based on four logical and theory-informed mechanisms between two statements, namely, (i) factual consistency, (ii) sentiment coherence, (iii) causal relation, and (iv) normative relation. We demonstrate that our operationalization of these logical mechanisms classifies argumentative relations without directly training on data labeled with the relations, significantly better than several unsupervised baselines. We further demonstrate that these mechanisms also improve supervised classifiers through representation learning.

2020

pdf bib
Detecting Attackable Sentences in Arguments
Yohan Jo | Seojin Bang | Emaad Manzoor | Eduard Hovy | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Finding attackable sentences in an argument is the first step toward successful refutation in argumentation. We present a first large-scale analysis of sentence attackability in online arguments. We analyze driving reasons for attacks in argumentation and identify relevant characteristics of sentences. We demonstrate that a sentence’s attackability is associated with many of these characteristics regarding the sentence’s content, proposition types, and tone, and that an external knowledge source can provide useful information about attackability. Building on these findings, we demonstrate that machine learning models can automatically detect attackable sentences in arguments, significantly better than several baselines and comparably well to laypeople.

pdf bib
Extracting Implicitly Asserted Propositions in Argumentation
Yohan Jo | Jacky Visser | Chris Reed | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Argumentation accommodates various rhetorical devices, such as questions, reported speech, and imperatives. These rhetorical tools usually assert argumentatively relevant propositions rather implicitly, so understanding their true meaning is key to understanding certain arguments properly. However, most argument mining systems and computational linguistics research have paid little attention to implicitly asserted propositions in argumentation. In this paper, we examine a wide range of computational methods for extracting propositions that are implicitly asserted in questions, reported speech, and imperatives in argumentation. By evaluating the models on a corpus of 2016 U.S. presidential debates and online commentary, we demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of the computational models. Our study may inform future research on argument mining and the semantics of these rhetorical devices in argumentation.

pdf bib
Machine-Aided Annotation for Fine-Grained Proposition Types in Argumentation
Yohan Jo | Elijah Mayfield | Chris Reed | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We introduce a corpus of the 2016 U.S. presidential debates and commentary, containing 4,648 argumentative propositions annotated with fine-grained proposition types. Modern machine learning pipelines for analyzing argument have difficulty distinguishing between types of propositions based on their factuality, rhetorical positioning, and speaker commitment. Inability to properly account for these facets leaves such systems inaccurate in understanding of fine-grained proposition types. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to annotating for four complex proposition types, namely normative claims, desires, future possibility, and reported speech. We develop a hybrid machine learning and human workflow for annotation that allows for efficient and reliable annotation of complex linguistic phenomena, and demonstrate with preliminary analysis of rhetorical strategies and structure in presidential debates. This new dataset and method can support technical researchers seeking more nuanced representations of argument, as well as argumentation theorists developing new quantitative analyses.

2019

pdf bib
Decompositional Argument Mining: A General Purpose Approach for Argument Graph Construction
Debela Gemechu | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This work presents an approach decomposing propositions into four functional components and identify the patterns linking those components to determine argument structure. The entities addressed by a proposition are target concepts and the features selected to make a point about the target concepts are aspects. A line of reasoning is followed by providing evidence for the points made about the target concepts via aspects. Opinions on target concepts and opinions on aspects are used to support or attack the ideas expressed by target concepts and aspects. The relations between aspects, target concepts, opinions on target concepts and aspects are used to infer the argument relations. Propositions are connected iteratively to form a graph structure. The approach is generic in that it is not tuned for a specific corpus and evaluated on three different corpora from the literature: AAEC, AMT, US2016G1tv and achieved an F score of 0.79, 0.77 and 0.64, respectively.

pdf bib
Advances in Argument Mining
Katarzyna Budzynska | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

This course aims to introduce students to an exciting and dynamic area that has witnessed remarkable growth over the past 36 months. Argument mining builds on opinion mining, sentiment analysis and related to tasks to automatically extract not just *what* people think, but *why* they hold the opinions they do. From being largely beyond the state of the art barely five years ago, there are now many hundreds of papers on the topic, millions of dollars of commercial and research investment, and the 6th ACL workshop on the topic will be in Florence in 2019. The tutors have delivered tutorials on argument mining at ACL 2016, at IJCAI 2016 and at ESSLLI 2017; for ACL 2019, we have developed a tutorial that provides a synthesis of the major advances in the area over the past three years.

pdf bib
Argument Mining: A Survey
John Lawrence | Chris Reed
Computational Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 4 - December 2019

Argument mining is the automatic identification and extraction of the structure of inference and reasoning expressed as arguments presented in natural language. Understanding argumentative structure makes it possible to determine not only what positions people are adopting, but also why they hold the opinions they do, providing valuable insights in domains as diverse as financial market prediction and public relations. This survey explores the techniques that establish the foundations for argument mining, provides a review of recent advances in argument mining techniques, and discusses the challenges faced in automatically extracting a deeper understanding of reasoning expressed in language in general.

pdf bib
An Online Annotation Assistant for Argument Schemes
John Lawrence | Jacky Visser | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

Understanding the inferential principles underpinning an argument is essential to the proper interpretation and evaluation of persuasive discourse. Argument schemes capture the conventional patterns of reasoning appealed to in persuasion. The empirical study of these patterns relies on the availability of data about the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice. Annotated corpora of argument schemes, however, are scarce, small, and unrepresentative. Aiming to address this issue, we present one step in the development of improved datasets by integrating the Argument Scheme Key – a novel annotation method based on one of the most popular typologies of argument schemes – into the widely used OVA software for argument analysis.

pdf bib
A Cascade Model for Proposition Extraction in Argumentation
Yohan Jo | Jacky Visser | Chris Reed | Eduard Hovy
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Argument Mining

We present a model to tackle a fundamental but understudied problem in computational argumentation: proposition extraction. Propositions are the basic units of an argument and the primary building blocks of most argument mining systems. However, they are usually substituted by argumentative discourse units obtained via surface-level text segmentation, which may yield text segments that lack semantic information necessary for subsequent argument mining processes. In contrast, our cascade model aims to extract complete propositions by handling anaphora resolution, text segmentation, reported speech, questions, imperatives, missing subjects, and revision. We formulate each task as a computational problem and test various models using a corpus of the 2016 U.S. presidential debates. We show promising performance for some tasks and discuss main challenges in proposition extraction.

2018

pdf bib
Intertextual Correspondence for Integrating Corpora
Jacky Visser | Rory Duthie | John Lawrence | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

pdf bib
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Explainable Computational Intelligence (XCI 2017)
M. Pereira-Fariña | C. Reed
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Explainable Computational Intelligence (XCI 2017)

pdf bib
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining
Ivan Habernal | Iryna Gurevych | Kevin Ashley | Claire Cardie | Nancy Green | Diane Litman | Georgios Petasis | Chris Reed | Noam Slonim | Vern Walker
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining

pdf bib
Mining Argumentative Structure from Natural Language text using Automatically Generated Premise-Conclusion Topic Models
John Lawrence | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining

This paper presents a method of extracting argumentative structure from natural language text. The approach presented is based on the way in which we understand an argument being made, not just from the words said, but from existing contextual knowledge and understanding of the broader issues. We leverage high-precision, low-recall techniques in order to automatically build a large corpus of inferential statements related to the text’s topic. These statements are then used to produce a matrix representing the inferential relationship between different aspects of the topic. From this matrix, we are able to determine connectedness and directionality of inference between statements in the original text. By following this approach, we obtain results that compare favourably to those of other similar techniques to classify premise-conclusion pairs (with results 22 points above baseline), but without the requirement of large volumes of annotated, domain specific data.

pdf bib
Using Complex Argumentative Interactions to Reconstruct the Argumentative Structure of Large-Scale Debates
John Lawrence | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining

In this paper we consider the insights that can be gained by considering large scale argument networks and the complex interactions between their constituent propositions. We investigate metrics for analysing properties of these networks, illustrating these using a corpus of arguments taken from the 2016 US Presidential Debates. We present techniques for determining these features directly from natural language text and show that there is a strong correlation between these automatically identified features and the argumentative structure contained within the text. Finally, we combine these metrics with argument mining techniques and show how the identification of argumentative relations can be improved by considering the larger context in which they occur.

2016

pdf bib
Corpus Resources for Dispute Mediation Discourse
Mathilde Janier | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

Dispute mediation is a growing activity in the resolution of conflicts, and more and more research emerge to enhance and better understand this (until recently) understudied practice. Corpus analyses are necessary to study discourse in this context; yet, little data is available, mainly because of its confidentiality principle. After proposing hints and avenues to acquire transcripts of mediation sessions, this paper presents the Dispute Mediation Corpus, which gathers annotated excerpts of mediation dialogues. Although developed as part of a project on argumentation, it is freely available and the text data can be used by anyone. This first-ever open corpus of mediation interactions can be of interest to scholars studying discourse, but also conflict resolution, argumentation, linguistics, communication, etc. We advocate for using and extending this resource that may be valuable to a large variety of domains of research, particularly those striving to enhance the study of the rapidly growing activity of dispute mediation.

pdf bib
A Corpus of Argument Networks: Using Graph Properties to Analyse Divisive Issues
Barbara Konat | John Lawrence | Joonsuk Park | Katarzyna Budzynska | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

Governments are increasingly utilising online platforms in order to engage with, and ascertain the opinions of, their citizens. Whilst policy makers could potentially benefit from such enormous feedback from society, they first face the challenge of making sense out of the large volumes of data produced. This creates a demand for tools and technologies which will enable governments to quickly and thoroughly digest the points being made and to respond accordingly. By determining the argumentative and dialogical structures contained within a debate, we are able to determine the issues which are divisive and those which attract agreement. This paper proposes a method of graph-based analytics which uses properties of graphs representing networks of arguments pro- & con- in order to automatically analyse issues which divide citizens about new regulations. By future application of the most recent advances in argument mining, the results reported here will have a chance to scale up to enable sense-making of the vast amount of feedback received from citizens on directions that policy should take.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016)
Chris Reed
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016)

pdf bib
The CASS Technique for Evaluating the Performance of Argument Mining
Rory Duthie | John Lawrence | Katarzyna Budzynska | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016)

bib
NLP Approaches to Computational Argumentation
Noam Slonim | Iryna Gurevych | Chris Reed | Benno Stein
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

Argumentation and debating represent primary intellectual activities of the human mind. People in all societies argue and debate, not only to convince others of their own opinions but also in order to explore the differences between multiple perspectives and conceptualizations, and to learn from this exploration. The process of reaching a resolution on controversial topics typically does not follow a simple sequence of purely logical steps. Rather it involves a wide variety of complex and interwoven actions. Presumably, pros and cons are identified, considered, and weighed, via cognitive processes that often involve persuasion and emotions, which are inherently harder to formalize from a computational perspective.This wide range of conceptual capabilities and activities, have only in part been studied in fields like CL and NLP, and typically within relatively small sub-communities that overlap the ACL audience. The new field of Computational Argumentation has very recently seen significant expansion within the CL and NLP community as new techniques and datasets start to become available, allowing for the first time investigation of the computational aspects of human argumentation in a holistic manner.The main goal of this tutorial would be to introduce this rapidly evolving field to the CL community. Specifically, we will aim to review recent advances in the field and to outline the challenging research questions - that are most relevant to the ACL audience - that naturally arise when trying to model human argumentation.We will further emphasize the practical value of this line of study, by considering real-world CL and NLP applications that are expected to emerge from this research, and to impact various industries, including legal, finance, healthcare, media, and education, to name just a few examples.The first part of the tutorial will provide introduction to the basics of argumentation and rhetoric. Next, we will cover fundamental analysis tasks in Computational Argumentation, including argumentation mining, revealing argument relations, assessing arguments quality, stance classification, polarity analysis, and more. After the coffee break, we will first review existing resources and recently introduced benchmark data. In the following part we will cover basic synthesis tasks in Computational Argumentation, including the relation to NLG and dialogue systems, and the evolving area of Debate Technologies, defined as technologies developed directly to enhance, support, and engage with human debating. Finally, we will present relevant demos, review potential applications, and discuss the future of this emerging field.

2015

pdf bib
Combining Argument Mining Techniques
John Lawrence | Chris Reed
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Argumentation Mining

2014

pdf bib
A Model for Processing Illocutionary Structures and Argumentation in Debates
Kasia Budzynska | Mathilde Janier | Chris Reed | Patrick Saint-Dizier | Manfred Stede | Olena Yakorska
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In this paper, we briefly present the objectives of Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) and the formal structure which is proposed for dialogues. Then, we introduce our development corpus, and a computational model designed for the identification of discourse minimal units in the context of argumentation and the illocutionary force associated with each unit. We show the categories of resources which are needed and how they can be reused in different contexts.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining
Nancy Green | Kevin Ashley | Diane Litman | Chris Reed | Vern Walker
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

pdf bib
Mining Arguments From 19th Century Philosophical Texts Using Topic Based Modelling
John Lawrence | Chris Reed | Colin Allen | Simon McAlister | Andrew Ravenscroft
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

2008

pdf bib
Language Resources for Studying Argument
Chris Reed | Raquel Mochales Palau | Glenn Rowe | Marie-Francine Moens
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper describes the development of a written corpus of argumentative reasoning. Arguments in the corpus have been analysed using state of the art techniques from argumentation theory and have been marked up using an open, reusable markup language. A number of the key challenges enountered during the process are explored, and preliminary observations about features such as inter-coder reliability and corpus statistics are discussed. In addition, several examples are offered of how this kind of language resource can be used in linguistic, computational and philosophical research, and in particular, how the corpus has been used to initiate a programme investigating the automatic detection of argumentative structure.

2004

pdf bib
A Computational Model of Emergent Simple Syntax: Supporting the Natural Transition from the One-Word Stage to the Two-Word Stage
Kris Jack | Chris Reed | Annalu Waller
Proceedings of the Workshop on Psycho-Computational Models of Human Language Acquisition

1998

pdf bib
Generating the Structure of Argument
Chris Reed | Derek Long
36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2

pdf bib
Generating the Structure of Argument
Chris Reed | Derek Long
COLING 1998 Volume 2: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics