Automated fact-checking based on machine learning is a promising approach to identify false information distributed on the web. In order to achieve satisfactory performance, machine learning methods require a large corpus with reliable annotations for the different tasks in the fact-checking process. Having analyzed existing fact-checking corpora, we found that none of them meets these criteria in full. They are either too small in size, do not provide detailed annotations, or are limited to a single domain. Motivated by this gap, we present a new substantially sized mixed-domain corpus with annotations of good quality for the core fact-checking tasks: document retrieval, evidence extraction, stance detection, and claim validation. To aid future corpus construction, we describe our methodology for corpus creation and annotation, and demonstrate that it results in substantial inter-annotator agreement. As baselines for future research, we perform experiments on our corpus with a number of model architectures that reach high performance in similar problem settings. Finally, to support the development of future models, we provide a detailed error analysis for each of the tasks. Our results show that the realistic, multi-domain setting defined by our data poses new challenges for the existing models, providing opportunities for considerable improvement by future systems.

We experiment with two recent contextualized word embedding methods (ELMo and BERT) in the context of open-domain argument search. For the first time, we show how to leverage the power of contextualized word embeddings to classify and cluster topic-dependent arguments, achieving impressive results on both tasks and across multiple datasets. For argument classification, we improve the state-of-the-art for the UKP Sentential Argument Mining Corpus by 20.8 percentage points and for the IBM Debater - Evidence Sentences dataset by 7.4 percentage points. For the understudied task of argument clustering, we propose a pre-training step which improves by 7.8 percentage points over strong baselines on a novel dataset, and by 12.3 percentage points for the Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) Corpus.

Argument mining aims to detect and identify argument structures from textual resources. In this paper, we aim to address the task of argumentative relation identification, a subtask of argument mining, for which several approaches have been recently proposed in a monolingual setting. To overcome the lack of annotated resources in less-resourced languages, we present the first attempt to address this subtask in a cross-lingual setting. We compare two standard strategies for cross-language learning, namely: projection and direct-transfer. Experimental results show that by using unsupervised language adaptation the proposed approaches perform at a competitive level when compared with fully-supervised in-language learning settings.

Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity. We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine) translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining.

Argument mining is a core technology for automating argument search in large document collections. Despite its usefulness for this task, most current approaches are designed for use only with specific text types and fall short when applied to heterogeneous texts. In this paper, we propose a new sentential annotation scheme that is reliably applicable by crowd workers to arbitrary Web texts. We source annotations for over 25,000 instances covering eight controversial topics. We show that integrating topic information into bidirectional long short-term memory networks outperforms vanilla BiLSTMs by more than 3 percentage points in F1 in two- and three-label cross-topic settings. We also show that these results can be further improved by leveraging additional data for topic relevance using multi-task learning.

Argument mining is a core technology for enabling argument search in large corpora. However, most current approaches fall short when applied to heterogeneous texts. In this paper, we present an argument retrieval system capable of retrieving sentential arguments for any given controversial topic. By analyzing the highest-ranked results extracted from Web sources, we found that our system covers 89% of arguments found in expert-curated lists of arguments from an online debate portal, and also identifies additional valid arguments.

Argument mining has become a popular research area in NLP. It typically includes the identification of argumentative components, e.g. claims, as the central component of an argument. We perform a qualitative analysis across six different datasets and show that these appear to conceptualize claims quite differently. To learn about the consequences of such different conceptualizations of claim for practical applications, we carried out extensive experiments using state-of-the-art feature-rich and deep learning systems, to identify claims in a cross-domain fashion. While the divergent conceptualization of claims in different datasets is indeed harmful to cross-domain classification, we show that there are shared properties on the lexical level as well as system configurations that can help to overcome these gaps.

In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures. The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations using Integer Linear Programming. We show that our model significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines on two different types of discourse. Moreover, we introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement.

In this paper, we propose a new task for assessing the quality of natural language arguments. The premises of a well-reasoned argument should provide enough evidence for accepting or rejecting its claim. Although this criterion, known as sufficiency, is widely adopted in argumentation theory, there are no empirical studies on its applicability to real arguments. In this work, we show that human annotators substantially agree on the sufficiency criterion and introduce a novel annotated corpus. Furthermore, we experiment with feature-rich SVMs and Convolutional Neural Networks and achieve 84% accuracy for automatically identifying insufficiently supported arguments. The final corpus as well as the annotation guideline are freely available for encouraging future research on argument quality.