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Available corpora for Argument Mining differ along several axes, and one of the key differences is the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal argumentative content. Exploring effective ways to use discourse markers has…
Many social media platforms offer a mechanism for readers to react to comments, both positively and negatively, which in aggregate can be thought of as community endorsement. This paper addresses the problem of predicting community…
Online incivility has emerged as a widespread and persistent problem in digital communities, imposing substantial social and psychological burdens on users. Although many platforms attempt to curb incivility through moderation and automated…
From an inconsistent database non-trivial arguments may be constructed both for a proposition, and for the contrary of that proposition. Therefore, inconsistency in a logical database causes uncertainty about which conclusions to accept.…
Algorithms for text-generation in dialogue can be misguided. For example, in task-oriented settings, reinforcement learning that optimizes only task-success can lead to abysmal lexical diversity. We hypothesize this is due to poor…
In emotionally supportive conversations, well-intended positivity can sometimes misfire, leading to responses that feel dismissive, minimizing, or unrealistically optimistic. We examine this phenomenon of incongruent positivity as…
Common methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviour heavily rely on human-labelled data. However, as models grow increasingly sophisticated, they will surpass human expertise, and the role of human evaluation…
The content on the web is in a constant state of flux. New entities, issues, and ideas continuously emerge, while the semantics of the existing conversation topics gradually shift. In recent years, pre-trained language models like BERT…
Information-seeking dialogues span a wide range of questions, from simple factoid to complex queries that require exploring multiple facets and viewpoints. When performing exploratory searches in unfamiliar domains, users may lack…
How reliably can we trust the scores obtained from social bias benchmarks as faithful indicators of problematic social biases in a given language model? In this work, we study this question by contrasting social biases with non-social…
This paper replicates, extends, and refutes conclusions made in a study published in PLoS ONE ("Even Good Bots Fight"), which claimed to identify substantial levels of conflict between automated software agents (or bots) in Wikipedia using…
Dialogue contradiction is a critical issue in open-domain dialogue systems. The contextualization nature of conversations makes dialogue contradiction detection rather challenging. In this work, we propose a benchmark for Contradiction…
Counterspeech can be an effective method for battling hateful content on social media. Automated counterspeech generation can aid in this process. Generated counterspeech, however, can be viable only when grounded in the context of topic,…
Discussion threads form a central part of the experience on many Web sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Google Plus and knowledge creation sites such as Wikipedia. To help users manage the challenge of allocating…
Online discussion moderators must make ad-hoc decisions about whether the contributions of discussion participants are appropriate or should be removed to maintain civility. Existing research on offensive language and the resulting tools…
There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains…
Research on conspiracy theories has largely focused on belief formation, exposure, and diffusion, while paying less attention to how their meanings change over time. This gap persists partly because conspiracy-related terms are often…
Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect…
We propose the task of narrative incoherence detection as a new arena for inter-sentential semantic understanding: Given a multi-sentence narrative, decide whether there exist any semantic discrepancies in the narrative flow. Specifically,…
Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions…