Before Name-calling

Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation

authored by

Ivan Habernal, Henning Wachsmuth, Iryna Gurevych, Benno Stein

Abstract

Arguing without committing a fallacy is one of the main requirements of an ideal debate. But even when debating rules are strictly enforced and fallacious arguments punished, arguers often lapse into attacking the opponent by an ad hominem argument. As existing research lacks solid empirical investigation of the typology of ad hominem arguments as well as their potential causes, this paper fills this gap by (1) performing several large-scale annotation studies, (2) experimenting with various neural architectures and validating our working hypotheses, such as controversy or reasonableness, and (3) providing linguistic insights into triggers of ad hominem using explainable neural network architectures.

External Organisation(s)

Technische Universität Darmstadt
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

386-396

No. of pages

11

Publication date

06.2018

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Linguistics and Language, Language and Linguistics, Computer Science Applications

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N18-1036 (Access: Open)