Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum

Christopher Hidey, Elena Musi, Alyssa Hwang, Smaranda Muresan, Kathy McKeown


Abstract
Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumentative structure that consists of argument components (e.g., claims, premises) and their argumentative relations (e.g., support, attack). Less emphasis has been placed on analyzing the semantic types of argument components. We propose a two-tiered annotation scheme to label claims and premises and their semantic types in an online persuasive forum, Change My View, with the long-term goal of understanding what makes a message persuasive. Premises are annotated with the three types of persuasive modes: ethos, logos, pathos, while claims are labeled as interpretation, evaluation, agreement, or disagreement, the latter two designed to account for the dialogical nature of our corpus. We aim to answer three questions: 1) can humans reliably annotate the semantic types of argument components? 2) are types of premises/claims positioned in recurrent orders? and 3) are certain types of claims and/or premises more likely to appear in persuasive messages than in non-persuasive messages?
Anthology ID:
W17-5102
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Ivan Habernal, Iryna Gurevych, Kevin Ashley, Claire Cardie, Nancy Green, Diane Litman, Georgios Petasis, Chris Reed, Noam Slonim, Vern Walker
Venue:
ArgMining
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5102
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5102
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christopher Hidey, Elena Musi, Alyssa Hwang, Smaranda Muresan, and Kathy McKeown. 2017. Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining, pages 11–21, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum (Hidey et al., ArgMining 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5102.pdf