Theme Aspect Argumentation Model for Handling Fallacies
This addresses the need for explainable fallacy identification in NLP to defend against manipulative rhetoric, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing fallacy classification methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically identifying and explaining fallacies in argumentation by introducing a novel context-aware argumentation model that uses formal constraints, enabling rigorous fallacy detection with proven consequences and analyzed computational complexities.
From daily discussions to marketing ads to political statements, information manipulation is rife. It is increasingly more important that we have the right set of tools to defend ourselves from manipulative rhetoric, or fallacies. Suitable techniques to automatically identify fallacies are being investigated in natural language processing research. However, a fallacy in one context may not be a fallacy in another context, so there is also a need to explain how and why it has come to be judged a fallacy. For the explainable fallacy identification, we present a novel approach to characterising fallacies through formal constraints, as a viable alternative to more traditional fallacy classifications by informal criteria. To achieve this objective, we introduce a novel context-aware argumentation model, the theme aspect argumentation model, which can do both: the modelling of a given argumentation as it is expressed (rhetorical modelling); and a deeper semantic analysis of the rhetorical argumentation model. By identifying fallacies with formal constraints, it becomes possible to tell whether a fallacy lurks in the modelled rhetoric with a formal rigour. We present core formal constraints for the theme aspect argumentation model and then more formal constraints that improve its fallacy identification capability. We show and prove the consequences of these formal constraints. We then analyse the computational complexities of deciding the satisfiability of the constraints.