The Impact of Modeling Overall Argumentation with Tree Kernels

authored by

Henning Wachsmuth, Giovanni da San Martino, Dora Kiesel, Benno Stein

Abstract

Several approaches have been proposed to model either the explicit sequential structure of an argumentative text or its implicit hierarchical structure. So far, the adequacy of these models of overall argumentation remains unclear. This paper asks what type of structure is actually important to tackle downstream tasks in computational argumentation. We analyze patterns in the overall argumentation of texts from three corpora. Then, we adapt the idea of positional tree kernels in order to capture sequential and hierarchical argumentative structure together for the first time. In systematic experiments for three text classification tasks, we find strong evidence for the impact of both types of structure. Our results suggest that either of them is necessary while their combination may be beneficial.

External Organisation(s)

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Qatar Computing Research institute

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

2379-2389

No. of pages

11

Publication date

08.2017

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science Applications, Information Systems, Computational Theory and Mathematics

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d17-1253 (Access: Open)