Before Name-Calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation
Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation Ivan Habernal† Henning Wachsmuth‡ Iryna Gurevych† Benno Stein‡ † Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP) and Research Training Group AIPHES Department of Computer Science, Technische Universitat¨ Darmstadt, Germany www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de www.aiphes.tu-darmstadt.de ‡ Faculty of Media, Bauhaus-Universitat¨ Weimar, Germany <firstname>.<lastname>@uni-weimar.de Abstract Although the ad hominem fallacy has been known since Aristotle, surprisingly there are very Arguing without committing a fallacy is one of few empirical works investigating its properties. the main requirements of an ideal debate. But even when debating rules are strictly enforced While Sahlane(2012) analyzed ad hominem and and fallacious arguments punished, arguers of- other fallacies in several hundred newspaper edi- ten lapse into attacking the opponent by an torials, others usually only rely on few examples, ad hominem argument. As existing research as observed by de Wijze(2002). As Macagno lacks solid empirical investigation of the ty- (2013) concludes, ad hominem arguments should pology of ad hominem arguments as well as be considered as multifaceted and complex strate- their potential causes, this paper fills this gap gies, involving not a simple argument, but sev- by (1) performing several large-scale annota- eral combined tactics. However, such research, to tion studies, (2) experimenting with various neural architectures and validating our work- the best of our knowledge, does not exist. Very ing hypotheses, such as controversy or reason- little is known not only about the feasibility of ableness, and (3) providing linguistic insights ad hominem theories in practical applications (the into triggers of ad hominem using explainable NLP perspective) but also about the dynamics and neural network architectures.
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