A Systematic Comparison of Methods for Finding Good Premises for Claims

Research on computational argumentation has recently become very popular. An argument consists of a claim that is supported or attacked by at least one premise. Its intention is the persuasion of others. An important problem in this field is retrieving good premises for a designated claim from a corpus of arguments. Given a claim, oftentimes existing approaches' first step is finding textually similar claims. In this paper we compare 196 methods systematically for determining similar claims by textual similarity, using a large corpus of (claim, premise) pairs crawled from debate portals. We also evaluate how well textual similarity of claims can predict relevance of the associated premises.