Determining Relative Argument Specificity and Stance
for Complex Argumentative Structures
Abstract
Systems for automatic argument generation
and debate require the ability to (1) determine
the stance of any claims employed in the argument and (2) assess the specificity of each
claim relative to the argument context. Existing work on understanding claim specificity
and stance, however, has been limited to the
study of argumentative structures that are relatively shallow, most often consisting of a single claim that directly supports or opposes the
argument thesis. In this paper, we tackle these
tasks in the context of complex arguments on a
diverse set of topics. In particular, our dataset
consists of manually curated argument trees
for 741 controversial topics covering 95,312
unique claims; lines of argument are generally of depth 2 to 6. We find that as the distance between a pair of claims increases along
the argument path, determining the relative
specificity of a pair of claims becomes easier
and determining their relative stance becomes
harder