Modeling the Quality of Dialogical Explanations

Explanations are pervasive in our lives. Mostly, they occur in dialogical form where an {\em explainer} discusses a concept or phenomenon of interest with an {\em explainee}. Leaving the explainee with a clear understanding is not straightforward due to the knowledge gap between the two participants. Previous research looked at the interaction of explanation moves, dialogue acts, and topics in successful dialogues with expert explainers. However, daily-life explanations often fail, raising the question of what makes a dialogue successful. In this work, we study explanation dialogues in terms of the interactions between the explainer and explainee and how they correlate with the quality of explanations in terms of a successful understanding on the explainee's side. In particular, we first construct a corpus of 399 dialogues from the Reddit forum {\em Explain Like I am Five} and annotate it for interaction flows and explanation quality. We then analyze the interaction flows, comparing them to those appearing in expert dialogues. Finally, we encode the interaction flows using two language models that can handle long inputs, and we provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness boost gained through the encoding in predicting the success of explanation dialogues.

The Touché23-ValueEval Dataset for Identifying Human Values behind Arguments

We present the Touch\'e23-ValueEval Dataset for Identifying Human Values behind Arguments. To investigate approaches for the automated detection of human values behind arguments, we collected 9324 arguments from 6 diverse sources, covering religious texts, political discussions, free-text arguments, newspaper editorials, and online democracy platforms. Each argument was annotated by 3 crowdworkers for 54 values. The Touch\'e23-ValueEval dataset extends the Webis-ArgValues-22. In comparison to the previous dataset, the effectiveness of a 1-Baseline decreases, but that of an out-of-the-box BERT model increases. Therefore, though the classification difficulty increased as per the label distribution, the larger dataset allows for training better models.

Conclusion-based Counter-Argument Generation

In real-world debates, the most common way to counter an argument is to reason against its main point, that is, its conclusion. Existing work on the automatic generation of natural language counter-arguments does not address the relation to the conclusion, possibly because many arguments leave their conclusion implicit. In this paper, we hypothesize that the key to effective counter-argument generation is to explicitly model the argument's conclusion and to ensure that the stance of the generated counter is opposite to that conclusion. In particular, we propose a multitask approach that jointly learns to generate both the conclusion and the counter of an input argument. The approach employs a stance-based ranking component that selects the counter from a diverse set of generated candidates whose stance best opposes the generated conclusion. In both automatic and manual evaluation, we provide evidence that our approach generates more relevant and stance-adhering counters than strong baselines.

"Mama Always Had a Way of Explaining Things So I Could Understand'': A Dialogue Corpus for Learning to Construct Explanations

As AI is more and more pervasive in everyday life, humans have an increasing demand to understand its behavior and decisions. Most research on explainable AI builds on the premise that there is one ideal explanation to be found. In fact, however, everyday explanations are co-constructed in a dialogue between the person explaining (the explainer) and the specific person being explained to (the explainee). In this paper, we introduce a first corpus of dialogical explanations to enable NLP research on how humans explain as well as on how AI can learn to imitate this process. The corpus consists of 65 transcribed English dialogues from the Wired video series \emph{5 Levels}, explaining 13 topics to five explainees of different proficiency. All 1550 dialogue turns have been manually labeled by five independent professionals for the topic discussed as well as for the dialogue act and the explanation move performed. We analyze linguistic patterns of explainers and explainees, and we explore differences across proficiency levels. BERT-based baseline results indicate that sequence information helps predicting topics, acts, and moves effectively

The Moral Debater: A Study on the Computational Generation of Morally Framed Arguments

An audience's prior beliefs and morals are strong indicators of how likely they will be affected by a given argument. Utilizing such knowledge can help focus on shared values to bring disagreeing parties towards agreement. In argumentation technology, however, this is barely exploited so far. This paper studies the feasibility of automatically generating morally framed arguments as well as their effect on different audiences. Following the moral foundation theory, we propose a system that effectively generates arguments focusing on different morals. In an in-depth user study, we ask liberals and conservatives to evaluate the impact of these arguments. Our results suggest that, particularly when prior beliefs are challenged, an audience becomes more affected by morally framed arguments.

Assessing the Sufficiency of Arguments through Conclusion Generation

The premises of an argument give evidence or other reasons to support a conclusion. However, the amount of support required depends on the generality of a conclusion, the nature of the individual premises, and similar. An argument whose premises make its conclusion rationally worthy to be drawn is called sufficient in argument quality research. Previous work tackled sufficiency assessment as a standard text classification problem, not modeling the inherent relation of premises and conclusion. In this paper, we hypothesize that the conclusion of a sufficient argument can be generated from its premises. To study this hypothesis, we explore the potential of assessing sufficiency based on the output of large-scale pre-trained language models. Our best model variant achieves an F1-score of .885, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art and being on par with human experts. While manual evaluation reveals the quality of the generated conclusions, their impact remains low ultimately.

Key Point Analysis via Contrastive Learning and Extractive Argument Summarization

Key point analysis is the task of extracting a set of concise and high-level statements from a given collection of arguments, representing the gist of these arguments. This paper presents our proposed approach to the Key Point Analysis shared task, collocated with the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining. The approach integrates two complementary components. One component employs contrastive learning via a siamese neural network for matching arguments to key points; the other is a graph-based extractive summarization model for generating key points. In both automatic and manual evaluation, our approach was ranked best among all submissions to the shared task.

Generating Informative Conclusions for Argumentative Texts

The purpose of an argumentative text is to support a certain conclusion. Yet, they are often omitted, expecting readers to infer them rather. While appropriate when reading an individual text, this rhetorical device limits accessibility when browsing many texts (e.g., on a search engine or on social media). In these scenarios, an explicit conclusion makes for a good candidate summary of an argumentative text. This is especially true if the conclusion is informative, emphasizing specific concepts from the text. With this paper we introduce the task of generating informative conclusions: First, Webis-ConcluGen-21 is compiled, a large-scale corpus of 136,996 samples of argumentative texts and their conclusions. Second, two paradigms for conclusion generation are investigated; one extractive, the other abstractive in nature. The latter exploits argumentative knowledge that augment the data via control codes and finetuning the BART model on several subsets of the corpus. Third, insights are provided into the suitability of our corpus for the task, the differences between the two generation paradigms, the trade-off between informativeness and conciseness, and the impact of encoding argumentative knowledge. The corpus, code, and the trained models are publicly available.

Argument Undermining: Counter-Argument Generation by Attacking Weak Premises

Text generation has received a lot of attention in computational argumentation research as of recent. A particularly challenging task is the generation of counter-arguments. So far, approaches primarily focus on rebutting a given conclusion, yet other ways to counter an argument exist. In this work, we go beyond previous research by exploring argument undermining, that is, countering an argument by attacking one of its premises. We hypothesize that identifying the argument's weak premises is key to effective countering. Accordingly, we propose a pipeline approach that first assesses the premises' strength and then generates a counter-argument targeting the weak ones. On the one hand, both manual and automatic evaluation proves the importance of identifying weak premises in counter-argument generation. On the other hand, when considering correctness and content richness, human annotators favored our approach over state-of-the-art counter-argument generation.