Publication Details

Modeling Frames in Argumentation

authored by
Yamen Ajjour, Milad Alshomary, Henning Wachsmuth, Benno Stein
Abstract

In argumentation, framing is used to emphasize a specific aspect of a controversial topic while concealing others. When discussing the legalization of drugs, for instance, its economical aspect may be emphasized. In general, we call a set of arguments that focus on the same aspect a frame. An argumentative text has to serve the “right” frame(s) to convince the audience to adopt the author's stance (e.g., being pro or con legalizing drugs). More specifically, an author has to choose frames that fit the audience's interests and cultural background. This paper introduces frame identification, which is the task of splitting a set of arguments into a set of non-overlapping frames. We present a fully unsupervised approach to this task, which first removes topical information from the arguments and then identifies frames using clustering. For evaluation purposes, we provide a corpus with 12 326 debate-portal arguments, organized along the frames of the debates' topics. On this corpus, our approach outperforms different strong baselines, achieving an F1-score of 0.28.

External Organisation(s)
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Paderborn University
Type
Conference contribution
Pages
2922-2932
No. of pages
11
Publication date
11.2019
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Computational Theory and Mathematics, Computer Science Applications, Information Systems
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1290 (Access: Open)
https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D19-1290 (Access: Unknown)