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    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Good Premises Retrieval via a Two-Stage Argument Retrieval Model</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Lorik Dumani</string-name>
          <email>dumani@uni-trier.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Trier University</institution>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2019</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>Computational argumentation is an emerging research area. An argument consists of a claim that is supported or attacked by at least one premise. Its intention is the persuasion of others to a certain standpoint. An important problem in this eld is the retrieval of good premises for a given claim from a corpus of arguments. Given a claim, a rst step of existing approaches is often to nd other claims that are textually similar. Then, the similar claim's premises can be retrieved. This paper presents a research plan for an implementation of a two-stage argument retrieval model that rst nds similar claims for a given query claim and then in the next step retrieves clusters of similar premises in a ranked order.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>
        Argumentation exists probably as long as humans
communicate but research on computational argumentation has
only recently become popular. In its simplest case an
argument consists of a claim or a standpoint that is supported
or attacked by at least one premise [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. These relations
between claims and premises can be expressed by argument
graphs. The purpose of argumentation is the persuasion of
others towards a certain standpoint. Since premises can in
turn be attacked or supported, often large argument
networks emerge for a major claim [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Our ultimate goal is, to support users arguing for or against
a topic by providing the best premises to similar topics in
a ranked order by convincingness, trustworthiness or user
context. There already exist argument search engines like
args1 or ArgumenText2 that take a claim as input and
return a list of premises that support or attack the query
claim. These systems usually work on precomputed
argument graphs that were either mined from texts or
extracted from dedicated argument websites like idebate.org or
1www.args.me
2www.argumentsearch.com
debatewise.org. One challenge in premises retrieval is the
small textual overlap between query claim and good
premises supporting or attacking. In this paper we present a
two-stage argument retrieval model. In contrast to existing
methods like [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] which often use a combination of claim
and premise as a retrieval unit, we argue that a more
promising and principled approach than directly querying for
premises is a two-stage process that rst retrieves, given a
query claim, matching claims from the argument collection,
and then considers their premises only. Then, instead of
retrieving single premises we aim to cluster similar premises
and to retrieve ranked clusters of premises.
      </p>
      <p>For the remainder of this paper Section 2 provides an
overview of fundamentals such as an introduction to the related
project ReCAP, and the common de nition of arguments
and argumentation. In Section 3 we present our research
plan to retrieve clusters of premises for a query claim.
Section 4 describes our evaluation plan and Section 5 serves
with some results we found. Section 6 provides an overview
of related work and Section 7 concludes the paper with some
future works.
2.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>FUNDAMENTALS</title>
      <p>This section introduces this work's related project ReCAP
as well as the common de nition of arguments and
argumentation.
2.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Project Context</title>
      <p>
        This work is part of the ReCAP project described in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]
which is part of the DFG priority program robust
argumentation machines (RATIO)3.
      </p>
      <p>
        ReCAP is an acronym for Information Retrieval and
CaseBased Reasoning for Robust Deliberation and Synthesis of
Arguments in the Political Discourse. The ReCAP project
follows the vision of future argumentation machines that
support researchers, journalistic writers, as well as human
decision makers to obtain a comprehensive overview of
current arguments and opinions related to a certain topic.
Furthermore, it aims to develop personal and well-founded
opinions that are justi ed by convincing arguments. While
existing search engines are limited to achieve this approach,
since they primarily operate on the textual level, such
argumentation machines will reason on the knowledge level formed
by arguments and argumentation structures. In [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] we
propose a general architecture for an argumentation machine
with focus on novel contributions to and con uence of
methods from Information Retrieval (IR) and Knowledge
Representation and Reasoning (RI), in particular Case-Based
Reasoning. Deliberation nds and weighs all arguments
supporting or opposing some question or topic based on the
available knowledge, e.g. by assessing their strength or
factual correctness, to enable informed decision making, e.g. for
a political action. Synthesis tries to generate new arguments
for an upcoming topic based on transferring an existing
relevant argument to the new topic and adapting it to the new
environment.
      </p>
      <p>This paper contributes to the retrieval of arguments, more
speci cally to the retrieval of clusters of the best premises
in a ranked order for a given query claim from a corpus of
arguments.
2.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Argumentation</title>
      <p>
        Argumentation is omnipresent and exists probably as long
as humans communicate with each other and research on
argumentation was already been studied by Aristotle more
than 2,300 year ago [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. By de nition, an argument consists
of a claim or standpoint supported or opposed by reasons or
premises [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. The terms claim and premise can be subsumed
under the term argument units [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        As shown in Figure 1 relations between claims and
premises can be expressed by argument graphs. The main claim
in a graph is called major claim [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ] and since premises can
in turn be attacked or supported, often large argument
networks emerge for a major claim [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. As Figure 1 suggests,
an argument unit such as p1 can also be used as a premise
to support another claim.
      </p>
      <p>
        In this example the premises support or attack the claim
but the kind of support or attack is not further speci ed.
However, supports can be speci ed with so-called inference
schemes [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]. Those schemes are templates for
argumentation that consist of claims and premises that are enriched
with descriptors that assign different roles to different
argument components to ease the choice of the correct scheme.
Following [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ], the support for the inference p1 ! C in this
example can be speci ed as \positive consequence". The
descriptor for the premise in this scheme is \If A is brought
about, good consequences will plausibly occur ". We can
interpret a reduce in oil dependency as a good consequence.
The descriptor for the claim in this scheme is \A should be
brought about ". The variable A in the descriptor can be
replaced with the demand to build new nuclear plants. In
contrast to supporting relations, there is no standard for the
speci cation of attacking relations in argumentation theory
yet.
      </p>
      <p>
        Wachsmuth et al. provide in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] a collection of
approaches in literature to measure argument quality in natural
language. Furthermore, they de ne a taxonomy of
dimensions to measure. The dimensions of argument quality can be
divided into the three dimensions logical quality in terms of
the cogency or strength of an argument, rhetorical quality in
terms of the persuasive effect of an argument or
argumentation, and dialectic quality in terms of the reasonableness of
argumentation for resolving issues [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ].
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>RESEARCH PLAN</title>
      <p>This section illustrates the research plan for implementing
the two-stage retrieval system. We explain the necessity of
the two stages and challenges we expect.</p>
      <p>C:
We should build new
nuclear power plants
supports</p>
      <p>attacks
p1:
Nuclear energy will reduce
oil dependency
supports</p>
      <p>p2:</p>
      <p>Expert E states that
nuclear energy will reduce
oil dependency
p3:
Building nuclear plants
endangers the
environment</p>
      <p>Our ultimate goal is the retrieval of good premises
supporting and attacking a given query claim or, more general,
related to a query topic. Such a query could be a full
sentence like e.g. \Find arguments to abandon nuclear energy "
or just consist of relevant terms such as \abandon nuclear
energy". One major challenge in the retrieval of premises is
that a good, convincing, and related premise to the query
does not necessarily need to have much textual overlap. This
can be illustrated with the premise \wind and solar energy
can already provide most of the energy we need " for the
upper query claims. A less good premise could be \I don't like
nuclear energy. I would abandon it ". It is evident that the
former premise only overlaps in the rather general term
\energy" but is more convincing than the latter premise which
however overlaps in the three words \abandon", \nuclear ",
and \energy".</p>
      <p>Since arguments consist of claims and premises, the
premises are directly tied to the claim, so we can tackle this
problem by using a two-stage retrieval process that rst
retrieves, given a query claim, matching claims from the
argument collection, and then considers their premises only.
In the rst step we only search for similar claims to the
user's query claim, i.e., ignoring the premises at this point
of time. Then in the second step we cluster similar premises
and retrieve them in a ranked order.
3.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>The First Stage</title>
      <p>In order to nd relevant claims to a query claim we need to
nd claims that are semantically similar to the query claim.
More precise, we need to nd claims that have relevant
premises to the query. So the challenge is to use basically
syntactic similarity to achieve semantic similarity. In order to
estimate the probability that a claim is relevant to the
query, we can use any similarity measure we identify for textual
Premises
Cluster 1
Premises
Cluster 2</p>
      <p>Result
Claim 2
Premises
Cluster 3
Result
Claim 3
data such as a plain language model, possibly with
additional smoothing and taking the textual context of the claim
into account.
3.3</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>The Second Stage</title>
      <p>
        Since we are searching for good premises for a query claim
that are obtained from similar claims to the query claim, we
can assume that similar claims often have similar
premises. Furthermore, as we are working with a large corpus of
arguments, we will nd a lot of similar premises, probably
from semantically completely different claims. So instead of
searching for single premises we group similar premises and
search for clusters of premises. For clustering all premises we
can rst convert all premises with the same stance into
embedding vectors and then perform a hierarchical clustering.
Instead of computing own models to get embedding vectors
we can make use of existing models such as the Universal
Sentence Encoder described in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]. We can use the Euclidean
distance to compute distances between vectors. Clustering
can be accomplished with agglomerative clustering, which
is a bottom-up approach. Since we prefer smaller clusters to
keep the number of false positives per cluster to a minimum,
complete linkage is a good way to connect clusters [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Figure 2 visualizes an example of the relation between a
query, similar claims, and clusters of similar premises. Here,
we have to answer the research question how often premises
which are similar to a premise do appear in claims that are
similar to the query claim. In order to estimate the
probability that a premise cluster should be chosen as supportive for a
claim, we can use a simple approach as a frequency-styled
argument, i.e., we need to count how frequently a premise
cluster from this claim supports similar claims in a large corpus.
Besides that, we can also consider to include inverse
document frequency-styled arguments, i.e., we need to count how
frequently the premise cluster was used as support or attack
for other claims in a large corpus. Other legit approaches
are to include estimates on truthfulness, appropriateness (of
the premise for the claim), and con dence in expert. The
ranking can incorporate factual correctness, convincingness,
but also user context such as prior knowledge or belief in
expert opinions, assumptions, and preferences. Therefore, we
will include quality measures such as those described in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ].
However, we need to investigate in the strength of the
cluster of premises. So far, there are only a few works in the
early stages of development concerning the quality of single
premises [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] but not clusters of premises.
3.4
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>Further Challenges</title>
      <p>
        Another problem that should be paid attention to is the
premise's stance, i.e., whether the premise supports or
attacks the claim. But also the claim's stance needs to be
determined. Consider e.g. the query claim \Nuclear energy
should be abolished " and the claim \Nuclear energy should
not be abolished ". These claims take different views but have
a high textual similarity which is why probably many
retrieval methods would output a high similarity. Still the
premises can not be adopted automatically. Moreover, claims often
do not have a stance if they are queries like \Should nuclear
energy be extended? " or consist only of terms like \Nuclear
energy". One legit possibility for claims with neutral
stances is to treat them as implicitly positive. Then, if a query
claim and a result claim have the same stance, a premise
that supports the result claim also supports the query claim
whereas if the query claim and the result claim have
opposite stances, a premise that supports the claim will attack
the query claim and vice versa. Another approach that could
make sense is to normalize stances of claims, i.e., to try to
have only \positive" claims. Alternatively we could revert
support and attack for negative claims. Still, that could be
difficult if stance is not fully clear. Nevertheless, there exist
algorithms for stance detection [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ] which we can then use
for this purpose.
      </p>
      <p>
        Consider Figure 1 again. As already stated a claim can be
used as premise to support or attack another claim. In this
instance, the premise p2 \Expert E states that nuclear energy
will reduce oil dependency " is used to support the argument
unit p1 \Nuclear energy will reduce oil dependency " which in
turn is used as premise to support the claim C \We should
build new nuclear power plants". We need to investigate in
the transitivity of inferences. In the example in Figure 1 to
which extent e.g. p2 is supportive for C. Analogously to that
we need to investigate in the case whether a premise is
supportive to a claim if the premise attacks another premise
that in turn attacks the claim. Assume there would be a
premise p4 \Humans endanger the environment either way "
that attacks premise p3 \Building nuclear plants endangers
the environment " which in turn already attacks claim C in
Figure 1. So we want to examine how supportive premises
such as p4 are generally to a claim. In [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] Wachsmuth et
al. simply adopt these as own premises for the claim.
However, we will investigate whether a partial score or a damping
factor yields better results. Since we are working with
clusters of premises we can select one premise as representative.
This could, for example, be the premise most similar to the
centroid in the cluster. Please remember that premises are
converted to embedding vectors to compute the clusters.
      </p>
      <p>
        So far we have considered less complex queries such as
\what are good reasons for nuclear energy ". A query
however can be much more complicated e.g. by the use of
constraints. Such a more complex query could be \what are
common statements with factual evidences of Expert E in the
last three months that nuclear energy is a viable option in
Germany". In this example a user demands factual evidences
for a geographically restricted area of a certain expert for a
certain topic in a certain time span. Furthermore, the
context could be desired to be restricted to opinions by certain
interest groups or parties with certain political orientation
such as left-wing parties. An approach could be to divide
complex queries into sub queries. If the query is expressed
as a coherent sentence its tree can be derived by the use
of Part-of-Speech implementations such as [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]. Then, a cut
can deliver useful sub queries.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>EVALUATION PLAN</title>
      <p>
        Instead of creating argument collections which is a very
time consuming task or automatically mine arguments from
natural language texts which might be noisy we will adapt
the idea of [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] and make use of several debate portals. In
fact we use idebate.org, debatewise.org, debatepedia.
org, and debate.org as starting point. While the rst three
are of high quality, the latter is of lower quality, i.e., some
few premises consist of insults or nonsense. However, the
latter contains much more debates as the other three
together. We expect this constellation to result in good
diversication. The constructions of debate portals already serve
with argument structures. One questioner asks the
community about a topic, e.g., \Should we build new nuclear power
plants". Then users of the community can directly answer
the questions and substantiate their posts e.g. with facts or
examples. Many debate portals also provide the possibility
of adding a stance for or against to an answer, as do the
portals we have selected for our study. The main advantages of
debate portals are that the posts are not arti cial but close
to reality. Besides that they are coherent. Following [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] we
use the debate portals' queries as claims and their answers
as premises to build arguments.
      </p>
      <p>
        We can divide the evaluation of the two-stage retrieval
process into two evaluation steps. First we want to nd
similar claims to a query claim. This can be achieved via an
existing textual similarity method. In order to decide which
similarity method is suitable we can take a small number n of
query claims and build pools of depth k by a union of result
claims of existing similarity methods. Then, annotators can
manually assess the similarity of each (query claim, result
claim) pair e.g. in the range between 1 (nothing in common)
and 5 (semantically equal). The question which similarity
method should be adopted for the retrieval of claims can be
shifted to the question which method's ranking comes
closest to the annotations. We will use state-of-the-art ranking
measures such as nDCG [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] for the evaluation of rankings.
      </p>
      <p>After we determined the most similar claims to a query
claim we want to retrieve their directly tied (clusters of)
premises. In order to validate the hypothesis that claims
highly similar to the query claim also have premises that are
highly relevant for the query claim, we can take a x number
of (query claim, result claim, result claim premise) pairs of
different similarities and let annotators manually assess the
pairs e.g. on a binary scale where the annotators are not
aware of the actual result claim. The higher the similarity
is between two claims the more relevant the one's premises
should be to the other claim.</p>
      <p>Furthermore, we need an end-to-end analysis to evaluate
the overall performance of our premise retrieval approach,
i.e., how well can our approach retrieve premises for a given
claim. For a subset of our query claims, we will build a pool
of all result premises in the top-k (for some k 2 N) of all
result lists and let annotators assess the premises'
relevance as explained above. In addition to that, we can conduct
a user study with more participants to overcome possible
shortcoming of having only few annotators to check the
results. By the use of nDCG at different cutoffs, averaged over
all queries, we can evaluate different retrieval methods for
this end-to-end analysis.
5.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>PRELIMINARY RESULTS</title>
      <p>In this section we give an overview of results we found
so far by investigating the stages of the two-stage retrieval
model. First we describe how we built our dataset consisting
of arguments, then we describe the rst, and then the second
step of the two-step retrieval process.</p>
      <p>
        The dataset described in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] is not publicly available,
therefore we reconstructed a similar dataset following the
approach in that paper. We crawled the arguments from
four debate portals, namely debate.org, debatepedia.org,
debatewise.org, and idebate.org. After the arguments
were extracted, they were indexed with Apache Lucene. In the
end, this resulted in overall 59,126 claims with 695,818
premises, so on average about 11.8 premises per claim.
      </p>
      <p>We now describe the rst step of the two-step retrieval
process. Since real-life query inputs of users are difficult to
nd, we drew a random sample of 233 claims and used them
as queries. In order to avoid claims that address completely
random topics, our sample contained only claims that are
related to the topic \energy". To do so, we trained a
wordembedding-model on the 59,126 claims of our corpus using
DeepLearning4j4. Then, we retrieved the nearest words of
the word energy and ltered out inappropriate suggestions.
Inappropriate suggestions were those that had nothing in
common with our topic energy in the broadest sense. We
repeated this approach ve times for all newly added
suggestions. In the end, we obtained 44 words such as \nuclear ",
\electricity", \wind ", \solar ", \oil ", \emission", etc. We got
1,529 candidate claims where at least one of these words
occurred, from which we drew a random sample of 233 claims,
making sure by manual inspection that they are really
related to the topic energy. To ensure that we end up with
at least 200 valid claims, we have added another 33. In the
end, we removed one claim because it appeared twice. We
considered 196 different retrieval methods5 implemented in
Apache Lucene and retrieved, for each method, result claims
for our 232 query claims. From the results, we built pools
of depth 5, i.e., including any claim that appeared in the
result list of any method at rank 5 or better. This resulted
in 5171 (query claim, result claim) pairs. Please note, that
pairs where the result claim was equal to the query claim
are already excluded.
4Among others we used SkipGram as learning algorithm, the
maximum window size was 8, the word vector size was 1000,
the text was not preprocessed, and the number of iterations
over the whole corpus was 15.
5Apache Lucene (Version 7.6.0) provides 139 similarity
methods as well as a class for multiple similarities. We tested
all combinations of the best methods' variants of
Divergence from Randomness, Divergence from Independence,
information-based models, and Axiomatic approaches as
well as BM25 and Jelinek-Mercer in a rst run and got
∑6k=2 (k6) = 57 new methods, resulting in 196 methods.</p>
      <p>The user-perceived similarity of each (query claim, result
claim) pair was independently assessed by at least two
annotators on the scale from 1 to 5. A total of eight people
participated in the annotation. They are all included in the
ReCAP project and were introduced to the basics of
argumentation theory. Table 1 explains the meanings of the
different levels. The underlying assumption of this scale is
that all premises of claims rated 4 or 5 should apply to the
query claim, whereas no premises of claims rated 1 should
apply. For claims rated 3, we expect that a good number of
premises match, whereas premises of claims rated 2 would
only rarely match. The annotators were confronted with the
query claim and a result claim and were asked to assess how
well they expect the premises of the result claim (that were
unknown to them) would match the query claim. Since we
only wanted to measure the relevance of claims at this point,
the actual premises were not considered at this point, but
investigated later. Since polarity of premises is not in the
focus of this study, we collapse the levels 4 and 5 into a single
level 4 for this study. As every pair of query claim and result
claim was assessed by at least two annotators, the nal
relevance value of a result claim for a query claim was computed
as the mean value of the corresponding assessments.</p>
      <p>
        Using the assessed pool of results as a gold standard,
we evaluated the performance of the 196 retrieval methods
under consideration for the claim retrieval task, using
nDCG@k [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] with cutoff values k 2 f1; 2; 5g as quality metric.
Our results clearly show that the BM25 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ] scoring method
used in previous works is usually not a good choice,
especially for cutoff 5, which is a realistic cutoff for a system that
aims at nding the top-10 premises. In contrast to the
method Divergence from Randomness (DFR) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ], which yielded
an nDCG@5 of 0.7982, BM25 yielded only 0.7616.
      </p>
      <p>We now focus on the second step of the two-stage
retrieval framework, retrieving the premises of claims similar to
the query claim. Our goal here is to verify the assumption
made above that claims highly similar to the query claim
also have premises that are highly relevant for the query
claim. To systematically approach this question, we formed
triples of the form (query claim, result claim, result premise)
from the above-mentioned pool, where the result premise is
a premise of the result claim. We grouped the triples
according to the relevance of the result claim to the query
claim, forming groups of the relevance ranges [n; n + 0:5)
for n 2 fn : 1 n 3:5g and [4; 4], which yielded seven
groups. Then, we randomly drew 100 (query claim, result
claim, result premise) triples from each group and had two
annotators manually assess the relevance of the result
premise for the query claim (without seeing the result claim),
resulting in 1400 assessments. Annotators could choose
between either not relevant or relevant with three different
stances: query with neutral stance, premise with same stance as
query and premise with opposite stance as query. As we did
with claims before, we ignore the stances of premises since
we only want to focus on their relevance, and many claims
of our dataset do not have a stance anyway. We thus
consider only binary relevance for premises from now on. Our
preliminary results support the observation that the more
relevant a claim for the query is, the more relevant premises
it yields. For example, 80 % of the premises of the result
claim in interval [4; 4] were relevant to the query claim. In
comparison, only 6 % of the premises in interval [1; 1:5] were
relevant to the query claim. So if a search engine performs
well at the claim retrieval task, it should also perform well at
the subsequent premise retrieval task; the initial hypothesis
is thus validated.
6.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>
        Wachsmuth et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] introduce one of the rst
prototypes of an argument search engine called args. Their system
operates on arguments crawled from debate portals. Given a
user query, the system retrieves, ranks, and presents
premises supporting and attacking the query claim, taking
similarity of the query claim with the premise, its corresponding
claim, and other contextual information into account. They
apply a standard BM25F ranking model implemented on top
of Lucene. In contrast to their system, we did not restrict
ourself to BM25 or variants, but evaluated 196 different
similarity methods for claim retrieval.
      </p>
      <p>
        Stab et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ] present ArgumenText, an argument
retrieval system capable of retrieving topic-relevant sentential
arguments from a large collection of diverse Web texts for
any given controversial topic. The system rst retrieves
relevant documents, then it identi es arguments and classi es
them as \pro" or \con", and presents them ranked by
relevance in a web interface. In their implementation, they make
use of Elasticsearch and BM25 to retrieve the top-ranked
documents. In contrast to this work, we do not consider
the argument mining task, but assume that we operate on
a collection of arguments with claims and premises.
However, in another work Habernal and Gurevych [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] propose
a semi-supervised model for argumentation mining of
usergenerated Web content.
      </p>
      <p>
        In [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ], Habernal and Gurevych address the relevance of
premises to estimate the convincingness of arguments using
neural networks. Since relevance underlies a subjective
judgement they rst confronted users in a crowdsourced task
with pairs of premises to decide which premise is more
convincing, and then used a bidrectional LSTM to predict which
argument is more convincing. Wachsmuth et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] consider
the problem of judging the relevance of arguments and
provide an overview of the work on computational argumentation
quality in natural language, including theories and
approaches. Approaches that predict relevance or convincingness of
premises can be useful to rank premises.
7.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK</title>
      <p>Retrieving good premises for claims is an important, but
difficult problem for which no good solutions exist yet. This
paper has provided some insights that a two-stage retrieval
process that rst retrieves claims, and then ranks their
clustered premises can be a step towards a solution. The best
premises are found for the most similar claims, according
to assessments by human annotators, is already good. We
showed that, instead of exhaustively assessing all retrieved
premises for a claim, it is sufficient to assess only the
retrieved claims, which is an order of magnitude less work.</p>
      <p>
        Our future work will include ranking methods for
premises. We will also examine additional quality-based premise
features [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] such as convincingness or correctness. We plan
for a public Web application as an interface to our premise
retrieval system.
      </p>
      <p>We will also tackle the task to detect stances. Although
debate portals ask users to add stances to the premises, these
stances are related to the claim, but the claims' stances are
not further speci ed. Hence, premises that support a claim
may attack a claim with an opposite stance and vice versa.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-13">
      <title>ACKNOWLEDGMENTS</title>
    </sec>
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