Improving (Dis)agreement Detection with Inductive Social Relation Information From Comment-Reply Interactions
This work addresses the limitation of existing methods that rely solely on textual information, particularly for cross-domain settings, by introducing a novel inductive social relation graph to improve detection accuracy.
The paper tackles the problem of (dis)agreement detection in text by incorporating social relation information from comment-reply interactions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the DEBAGREEMENT benchmark for both in-domain and cross-domain tasks.
(Dis)agreement detection aims to identify the authors' attitudes or positions (\textit{agree, disagree, neutral}) towards a specific text. It is limited for existing methods merely using textual information for identifying (dis)agreements, especially for cross-domain settings. Social relation information can play an assistant role in the (dis)agreement task besides textual information. We propose a novel method to extract such relation information from (dis)agreement data into an inductive social relation graph, merely using the comment-reply pairs without any additional platform-specific information. The inductive social relation globally considers the historical discussion and the relation between authors. Textual information based on a pre-trained language model and social relation information encoded by pre-trained RGCN are jointly considered for (dis)agreement detection. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for both the in-domain and cross-domain tasks on the benchmark -- DEBAGREEMENT. We find social relations can boost the performance of the (dis)agreement detection model, especially for the long-token comment-reply pairs, demonstrating the effectiveness of the social relation graph. We also explore the effect of the knowledge graph embedding methods, the information fusing method, and the time interval in constructing the social relation graph, which shows the effectiveness of our model.