Automatic arguments construction -from search engine to research engine

Abstract

While discussing a concrete controversial topic, most humans will find it challenging to swiftly raise a diverse set of convincing and relevant arguments. In this paper we present a system that, given a point of view about a controversial topic, automatically generates arguments supporting and contesting it. This is achieved by breaking the task of automatic argument construction into a pipeline of successive modules, each is responsible for a specific tangible task such as documents retrieval, identifying building blocks of arguments within a document, and analyzing whether these building blocks support or contest the point of view. By providing an interface for humans to interact and intervene at different points in the pipeline, we present an interactive research tool which, for a given topic and a corpus of documents such as Wik-ipedia or newspaper archive, provides a more comprehensive view and deeper insights than can be obtained using standard search engines.