Abstract
Argumentation Mining aims at finding components of arguments, as well as relations between them, in text. One of the largely unsolved problems is implicitness, where the text invites the reader to infer a missing component, such as the claim or a supporting statement. In the work of Wojatzki and Zesch (2016), an interesting implicitness problem is addressed on a Twitter data set. They showed that implicit stances toward a claim can be found with some success using just token and character n-grams. Using the same dataset, we show that results for this task can be improved using word and sentence embeddings, but that not all embedding variants perform alike. Specifically, we compare fastText, GloVe, and Universal Sentence Encoder (USE); and we find that, to our knowledge, USE yields state-of-the-art results for this task.
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- 1.
The code can be downloaded from https://github.com/RobinSchaefer/tweet-stance-classification.
- 2.
- 3.
Note that during punctuation removal #’s are ignored in order to maintain hashtags, which we assume to be meaningful for our task.
- 4.
The Snowball Stemmer is implemented using NLTK [13].
- 5.
As the USE model has been trained exclusively for 512-dimensional vectors [7], we are unable to create 300-dimensional vectors that would have been more directly comparable to the fastText and GloVe vectors.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Michael Wojatzki for sharing further details about their implementation with us. We would further like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Schaefer, R., Stede, M. (2019). Improving Implicit Stance Classification in Tweets Using Word and Sentence Embeddings. In: Benzmüller, C., Stuckenschmidt, H. (eds) KI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11793. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30179-8_26
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