Touché: Argument Retrieval. The tasks, the data, and best practices
Channel: IIIA Hub
Date: 2022-03-23

Touché: Argument Retrieval. The tasks, the data, and best practices
Alexander Bondarenko,  Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Talk at the Search Engines course, A.Y. 2021/2022 (https://iiia.dei.unipd.it/education/search-engines/)
MD in Computer Engineering (https://degrees.dei.unipd.it/master-degrees/computer-engineering/) 
MD in Data Science (https://datascience.math.unipd.it/)
University of Padua, Italy

Abstract: 
The goal of the Touché shared tasks on argument retrieval is to foster and support the development of technologies for argument mining, argument analysis, and retrieval. In my presentation, I will describe the two shared tasks: (a) argument retrieval for controversial topics, where participants retrieve a gist of arguments from a collection of online debates, (b) argument retrieval for comparative questions, where participants retrieve argumentative passages from a generic web crawl. First, I will provide details about the tasks. Then, I will introduce the common approaches to information retrieval and how they apply to argument retrieval. Finally, I will talk about the most effective approaches used in previous editions of the shared tasks.

Bio: 
Alexander received his Diploma in Systems Engineering and a Masters's degree in Computer Science and Digital Media. Alexander is currently a final year PhD student and Research Assistant at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. His research focuses on Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering Systems, Axiomatic Thinking, and Argumentation in Information Retrieval. Alexander regularly serves as a program committee member for different IR conferences such as CHIIR and ECIR.