Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation
This addresses the problem of understanding and mitigating fallacious reasoning in online debates for researchers and practitioners in computational linguistics.
The paper tackles the lack of empirical investigation into ad hominem fallacies in web arguments by conducting large-scale annotation studies and neural experiments, resulting in linguistic insights into their triggers.
Arguing without committing a fallacy is one of the main requirements of an ideal debate. But even when debating rules are strictly enforced and fallacious arguments punished, arguers often lapse into attacking the opponent by an ad hominem argument. As existing research lacks solid empirical investigation of the typology of ad hominem arguments as well as their potential causes, this paper fills this gap by (1) performing several large-scale annotation studies, (2) experimenting with various neural architectures and validating our working hypotheses, such as controversy or reasonableness, and (3) providing linguistic insights into triggers of ad hominem using explainable neural network architectures.