15 accepted papers
Moderation is essential for maintaining and improving the quality of online discussions. This involves: (1) countering negativity, e.g. hate speech and toxicity, and (2) promoting positive discourse, e.g. broadening the discussion to involve other users and perspectives. While significant efforts ha…
The NLP community has converged on considering disagreement in annotation (or human label variation, HLV) as a constitutive feature of subjective tasks. This paper makes a further step by investigating the relationship between HLV and model uncertainty, and the impact of linguistic features of the i…
Human moderators in online discussions face a heterogeneous range of tasks, which go beyond content moderation, or policing. They also support and improve discussion quality, which is challenging to model (and evaluate) in NLP due to its inherent subjectivity and the scarcity of annotated resources.
This paper investigates hybrid intelligence and collaboration between researchers of sexism and Large Language Models (LLMs), with afour-component pipeline. First, nine sexism researchers answer questions about their knowledge of sexism and of LLMs. They then participate in two interactive experimen…
The assessment of argument quality depends on well-established logical, rhetorical, and dialectical properties that are unavoidably subjective: multiple valid assessments may exist, there is no unequivocal ground truth. This aligns with recent paths in machine learning, which embrace the co-existenc…
The computational treatment of arguments on controversial issues has been subject to extensive NLP research, due to its envisioned impact on opinion formation, decision making, writing education, and the like. A critical task in any such application is the assessment of an argument’s quality - but i…
Research on language as interactive discourse underscores the deliberate use of demographic parameters such as gender, ethnicity, and class to shape social identities. For example, by explicitly disclosing one’s information and enforcing one’s social identity to an online community, the reception by…
Storytelling, i.e., the use of of anecdotes and personal experiences, plays a crucial role in everyday argumentation. This is particularly true for the highly controversial debates that spark in times of crisis - where the focus of the discussion is on heterogeneous aspects of everyday life. For ind…
Political discourse on Twitter is a moving target: politicians continuously make statements about their positions. It is therefore crucial to track their discourse on social media to understand their ideological positions and goals. However, Twitter data is also challenging to work with since it is…
Argument maps structure discourse into nodes in a tree with each node being an argument that supports or opposes its parent argument. This format is more comprehensible and less redundant compared to an unstructured one. Exploring those maps and maintaining their structure by placing new arguments u…
Humans are storytellers, even in communication scenarios which are assumed to be more rationality-oriented, such as argumentation. Indeed, supporting arguments with narratives or personal experiences (henceforth, stories) is a very natural thing to do – and yet, this phenomenon is largely unexplored…
Translate-train or few-shot cross-lingual transfer can be used to improve the zero-shot performance of multilingual pretrained language models. Few-shot utilizes high-quality low-quantity samples (often manually translated from the English corpus ). Translate-train employs a machine translation of t…
Many tasks in text-based computational social science (CSS) involve the classification of political statements into categories based on a domain-specific codebook. In order to be useful for CSS analysis, these categories must be fine-grained. The typically skewed distribution of fine-grained categor…
Reports of personal experiences or stories can play a crucial role in argumentation, as they represent an immediate and (often) relatable way to back up one’s position with respect to a given topic. They are easy to understand and increase empathy: this makes them powerful in argumentation. The impa…
This survey builds an interdisciplinary picture of Argument Mining (AM), with a strong focus on its potential to address issues related to Social and Political Science. More specifically, we focus on AM challenges related to its applications to social media and in the multilingual domain, and then p…