Unsupervised corpus-wide claim detection

Automatic claim detection is a fundamental argument mining task that aims to automatically mine claims regarding a topic of consideration. Previous works on mining argumentative content have assumed that a set of relevant documents is given in advance. Here, we present a first corpus- wide claim detection framework, that can be directly applied to massive corpora. Using simple and intuitive empirical observations, we derive a claim sentence query by which we are able to directly retrieve sentences in which the prior probability to include topic-relevant claims is greatly enhanced. Next, we employ simple heuristics to rank the sentences, leading to an unsupervised corpus-wide claim detection system, with precision that outperforms previously reported results on the task of claim detection given relevant documents and labeled data.