DFG funds new project on comparative argument mining
10 October 2017, by Reinhard Zierke
DFG funds ACQUA project
In this project, we will conduct research on comparative arguments. Our goal is a technology for answering comparative questions in general with reasonable coverage.
To reach this goal, we propose a new approach involving several stages: (1) understanding comparative questions by users, (2) retrieving comparative argumentative structures relevant to a question from a web-scale text corpus, (3) gathering aspects of objects from a Wikipedia-based knowledge base enriched with aspects extracted from text, (4) comparison of objects on the basis of comparative argumentative structures and object aspects, (5) generation of arguments supporting the object choice, and (6) answer presentation. Key to our technology is a novel approach to argument mining that performs joint retrieval of documents relevant to the input question and extraction of complex argumentative structures from text.
Our project will put argument mining in the context of the complex task of answering comparative questions, showing how argument mining can enable the creation of new kinds of semantic technologies. Prominent applications of the proposed comparative question answering approach are dialogue systems, decision support systems, and direct answers in web search engines.
Project partners:
- Prof. Matthias Hagen, BU Weimar
- LT Group, UHH
The project will run for 3 years, starting in early 2018. The project is part of SPP RATIO - Robust Argumentation Machines.