Argumentative Relation Classification as Plausibility Ranking
This work addresses the problem of classifying support vs. attack relations in arguments for natural language processing applications, offering a simpler yet competitive method with notable performance gains.
The paper tackled argumentative relation classification by framing it as a plausibility ranking task, using a reconstruction trick to create plausible and implausible text pairs, resulting in a more than 10% macro F1 increase in a content-based version and improved precision for the attack class with minimal recall loss.
We formulate argumentative relation classification (support vs. attack) as a text-plausibility ranking task. To this aim, we propose a simple reconstruction trick which enables us to build minimal pairs of plausible and implausible texts by simulating natural contexts in which two argumentative units are likely or unlikely to appear. We show that this method is competitive with previous work albeit it is considerably simpler. In a recently introduced content-based version of the task, where contextual discourse clues are hidden, the approach offers a performance increase of more than 10% macro F1. With respect to the scarce attack-class, the method achieves a large increase in precision while the incurred loss in recall is small or even nonexistent.