Few-Shot Learning for Argument Aspects of the Nuclear Energy Debate

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

We approach aspect-based argument mining as a supervised machine learning task to classify arguments into semantically coherent groups referring to the same defined aspect categories. As an exemplary use case, we introduce the Argument Aspect Corpus-Nuclear Energy that separates arguments about the topic of nuclear energy into nine major aspects. Since the collection of training data for further aspects and topics is costly, we investigate the potential for current transformer-based few-shot learning approaches to accurately classify argument aspects. The best approach is applied to a British newspaper corpus covering the debate on nuclear energy over the past 21 years. Our evaluation shows that a stable prediction of shares of argument aspects in this debate is feasible with 50 to 100 training samples per aspect. Moreover, we see signals for a clear shift in the public discourse in favor of nuclear energy in recent years. This revelation of changing patterns of pro and contra arguments related to certain aspects over time demonstrates the potential of supervised argument aspect detection for tracking issue-specific media discourses.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2022 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages663-672
Number of pages10
ISBN (electronic)9791095546726
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLanguage Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)

Conference

Title13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022
Duration20 - 25 June 2022
CityMarseille
CountryFrance

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-9756-6390/work/146644782

Keywords

Keywords

  • argument aspects, argument frames, argument mining, aspect-based argument mining, few-shot learning, nuclear energy discourse, text classification