Representing and Determining Argumentative Relevance in Online Discussions: A General Approach

Understanding an online argumentative discussion is essential for understanding users' opinions on a topic and their underlying reasoning. A key challenge in determining completeness and persuasiveness of argumentative discussions is to assess how arguments under a topic are connected in a logical and coherent manner. Online argumentative discussions, in contrast to essays or face-to-face communication, challenge techniques for judging argument relevance because online discussions involve multiple participants and often exhibit incoherence in reasoning and inconsistencies in writing style. We define relevance as the logical and topical connections between small texts representing argument fragments in online discussions. We provide a corpus comprising pairs of sentences, labeled with argumentative relevance between the sentences in each pair. We propose a computational approach relying on content reduction and a Siamese neural network architecture for modeling argumentative connections and determining argumentative relevance between texts. Experimental results indicate that our approach is effective in measuring relevance between arguments, and outperforms strong and well-adopted baselines. Further analysis demonstrates the benefit of using our argumentative relevance encoding on a downstream task, predicting how impactful an online comment is to certain topic, comparing to encoding that does not consider logical connection.