Segmentation of Complex Question Turns for Argument Mining: A Corpus-based Study in the Financial Domain

Giulia D'Agostino, Chris Reed, David Puccinelli

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Citations (Scopus)
8 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Within the financial communication domain, Earnings Conference Calls (ECCs) play a pivotal role in tracing (a) the presentational strategies and trust-building devices used by company representatives and (b) the relevant hot-topics for stakeholders, from which they form an (e)valuation of the company. Due to their formally regulated nature, ECCs are a favoured domain for the study of argumentation in context and the extraction of Argumentative Discourse Units (ADUs). However, the idiosyncratic structure of dialogical exchanges in Q&A sessions of ECCs, particularly at the level of question formulation, challenges existing models of argument mining, which assume adjacency of related question and answer turns in the dialogue. Maximal Interrogative Units (MIUs) are a novel approach to grouping together topically contiguous argumentative components within a question turn. MIU identification allows application of existing argument mining techniques to a less noisy unit of text, following removal of discourse regulators and splitting into sub-units of thematically related text. Evaluation of an automated method for MIU recognition is also presented with respect to gold-standard manual annotation.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Place of PublicationTorino, Italy
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages14524-14530
Publication statusPublished - May 2024
EventThe 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation - Lingotto Conference Centre, Torino, Italy
Duration: 22 May 202424 May 2024
https://lrec-coling-2024.org/

Conference

ConferenceThe 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation
Abbreviated titleLREC-COLING 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityTorino
Period22/05/2424/05/24
Internet address

Keywords

  • text segmentation
  • Q&A
  • argument mining
  • financial communication

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