Argumentative Text Understanding for AI Debater (NLPCC2021)



Track 1

Claim Stance Classification for Debating
Introduction

In this task, given a pair of topic and claim, participants are required to classify the stance of the claim towards the topic into either Support, Against or Neutral.


Dataset

We collect debating topics from online forums and topic-related articles from Wikipedia (for English) and Baidu Encyclopedia (for Chinese). Human annotators were recruited to annotate claims from the collected articles and identify their stances with regards to the given topics. Human translators were recruited to translate the English claims into Chinese.

The format of data file is as follows: The data is in TXT format, and each line includes three items: topic, claim, and the label ({support, against, neutral}), separated by tab. Below are some examples:

  • 大学教育应该免费<tab>高等教育免费导致了较低的学术水平<tab>against
  • 应该放弃独生子女政策<tab>独生子女很难独自照顾年迈的父母<tab>support
  • 人工智能最终会取代人类<tab>人工智能在计算机领域内得到了愈加广泛的重视<tab>neutral


Evaluation Metric

Accuracy is used as the evaluation metric.


Track 1 Contact

Ruidan He, heruidan0830@gmail.com


Track 2

Interactive Argument Pair Identification in Online Forum
Introduction

Interactive argument opposition refers to the opposite views expressed by different participants on the same topic in a dialogical argumentation scenario (such as a debate contest, which involves two or more parties).

This task is to identify the argument pairs with interactive relationship in online forum. Given an original argument and five candidate arguments, you are required to identify the correct one for the candidates. For each argument, its context are provided as well.


Dataset

We collect the original raw dataset from an online forum changemyview in reddit.com. We further extract all the "quotation-reply" argument pairs to form our experimental dataset. For each sample, we use q to represent the quotation argument, and cq to represent the context of the quotation argument, r1-r5 represent the candidate reply arguments, c1-c5 represent the candidate reply context respectively. The format of data file is as follows:

  • [cq] when i see debate about the big issues stuff like climate change, or gun rights, or public healthcare policy people do not seem to particularly care about evidence.  if they shift on these issues, its for emotional reasons.  ...
  • [q] when i see debate about the big issues stuff like climate change, or gun rights, or public healthcare policy people do not seem to particularly care about  evidence.
  • [r1] (Correct Answer) if they shift on these issues, its for emotional reasons.
  • [c1] if they shift on these issues, its for emotional reasons.  i am going to disagree with you in the opposite direction from most commenters.  on hot button issues, people do respond to evidence.  ...
  • ...
  • [r5] but again, i feel like this is emotional, subjective decision making which is great in this context, rather than objective assessment of facts.
  • [c5] before ww0 was very different. people were mostly rural, less educated, it was a very different kind of society. ...
The details of data and baseline model are shown in reference 6. Lu Ji, Zhongyu Wei, Jing Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang. Discrete Argument Representation Learning for Interactive Argument Pair Identification. NAACL 2021.


Evaluation Metric

Accuracy is used as the evaluation metric.


Track 2 Contact

Jian Yuan, 19210980107@fudan.edu.cn


Track 3

APE: Argument Pair Extraction from Peer Review and Rebuttal
Introduction

Peer review and rebuttal, with rich interactions and argumentative discussions in between, are naturally a good resource to mine arguments. We introduce an argument pair extraction (APE) task on peer review and rebuttal in order to study the contents, the structure and the connections between them. Participants are required to detect the argument pairs from each passage pair of review and rebuttal.


Dataset

We collect the peer review and rebuttals of ICLR 2013 - 2020 (except for 2015 that is unavailable) from openreview.net. The data format is as follows: <review comments / author reply> <BIO tag> - <review/reply> <BIO tag> - <Pairing Index> <review/reply> <Paper ID>.

Each entry is separated by a \t. Each instance (that is, each pair of review comments and author reply) is separated by a blank line. The newline character in the data is represented by <SEP>, which is usually added at the beginning of the next paragraph. Only B and I tags are followed by <review/reply> or <pairing number>, and O tags are not followed by any other tags.

  • Example 1: the sample complexity of the problem is rather difficult. \t B-review \t B-2 \t Review \t 20484
  • Example 2: Thank you for your careful review and thoughtful comments \t O \t O \t Reply \t 20484
The details of data and baseline model are shown in reference 5. Liying Cheng, Lidong Bing, Qian Yu, Wei Lu, Luo Si. APE: Argument Pair Extraction from Peer Review and Rebuttal via Multi-task Learning. EMNLP 2020.


Evaluation Metric

F1 score is used as the evaluation metric.


Track 3 Contact

Liying Cheng, liying.cheng@alibaba-inc.com


Awards

The three tracks are ranked and awarded separately:

  • The 1st prize (1 team, 5000RMB Bonus each team)
  • The 2nd prize (2 team, 2000RMB Bonus each team)
  • The 3rd prize (3 team, 1000RMB Bonus each team)

Reference

  1. Zhongyu Wei, Yang Liu, Yi Li. Is this post persuasive? Ranking argumentative comments in online forum. ACL 2016.
  2. Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee. Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions. WWW 2016.
  3. Lu Ji, Zhongyu Wei, Xiangkun Hu, Yang Liu, Qi Zhang, Xuan-Jing Huang. Incorporating argument-level interactions for persuasion comments evaluation using co-attention model. COLING 2018.
  4. Di Chen, Jiachen Du, Lidong Bing, Ruifeng Xu. Hybrid Neural Attention for Agreement/Disagreement Inference in Online Debates. EMNLP 2018.
  5. Liying Cheng, Lidong Bing, Qian Yu, Wei Lu, Luo Si. APE: Argument Pair Extraction from Peer Review and Rebuttal via Multi-task Learning. EMNLP 2020.
  6. Lu Ji, Zhongyu Wei, Jing Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang. Discrete Argument Representation Learning for Interactive Argument Pair Identification. NAACL 2021.


         Contact: aidebater@163.com          website:http://www.fudan-disc.com/sharedtask/AIDebater21/index.html