Counter-Argument Generation by Attacking Weak Premises

Counter-Argument Generation by Attacking Weak Premises

authored by

Milad Alshomary, Shahbaz Syed, Arkajit Dhar, Martin Potthast, Henning Wachsmuth

Abstract

Text generation has received a lot of attention in computational argumentation research as of recently. A particularly challenging task is the generation of counter-arguments. So far, approaches primarily focus on rebutting a given conclusion, yet other ways to counter an argument exist. In this work, we go beyond previous research by exploring argument undermining, that is, countering an argument by attacking one of its premises. We hypothesize that identifying the argument's weak premises is key to effective countering. Accordingly, we propose a pipeline approach that first assesses the premises' strength and then generates a counter-argument undermining the weakest among them. On one hand, both manual and automatic evaluation underline the importance of identifying weak premises in counterargument generation. On the other hand, when considering correctness and content richness, human annotators favored our approach over state-of-the-art counter-argument baselines.

External Organisation(s)

Paderborn University
Leipzig University

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

1816-1827

No. of pages

12

Publication date

2021

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.159 (Access: Open)