Advances in Debating Technologies: Building AI That Can Debate Humans (2021)

Abstract: The tutorial focuses on Debating Technologies, a sub-field of computational argumentation defined as “computational technologies developed directly to enhance, support, and engage with human debating” (Gurevych et al., 2016). A recent milestone in this field is Project Debater, which was revealed in 2019 as the first AI system that can debate human experts on complex topics. Project Debater is the third in the series of IBM Research AI’s grand challenges, following Deep Blue and Watson. It has been developed for over six years by a large team of researchers and engineers, and its live demonstration in February 2019 received massive media attention. This research effort has resulted in more than 50 scientific papers to date, and many datasets freely available for research purposes. We discuss the scientific challenges that arise when building such a system, including argument mining, argument quality assessment, stance classification, principled argument detection, narrative generation, and rebutting a human opponent. Many of the underlying capabilities of Project Debater have been made freely available for academic research, and the tutorial will include a detailed explanation of how to use and leverage these tools. In addition to discussing individual components, the tutorial also provides a holistic view of a debating system. Such a view is largely missing in the academic literature, where each paper typically addresses a specific problem in isolation. We present a complete pipeline of a debating system, and discuss the information flow and the interaction between the various components. Finally, we discuss practical applications and future challenges of debating technologies.

## tutorial type this is a cutting-edge tutorial. the main difference between this tutorial and previous tutorials on computational argumentation or argument mining @xcite ) is that we focus on the science behind debating systems -systems that can engage in a live debate with humans. accordingly, a large portion of the tutorial's topics, e.g., listening comprehension, rebuttal, narrative generation and modeling human dilemma, was not covered in previous tutorials. some of the topics, like argument mining, argument quality and stance classification were previously discussed in the tutorial of @xcite , however we will mostly focus on more recent advancements in these areas. the tutorial of @xcite focused on argument structure parsing based on argumentation theory, which can be viewed as complementary to the content of the current tutorial. ## prerequisites the tutorial will be self-contained. we assume basic knowledge of nlp and machine learning, at the level of introductory courses in these areas. roy bar-haim is a research staff member at ibm research ai. since joining project debater in 2013, he has been leading a global research team working on stance classification, sentiment analysis, argument mining and argument summarization. he has published in leading nlp and ai conferences and journals, including acl, emnlp, aaai, coling, eacl, jair and jnle. he regularly reviews for top nlp and ai conferences, and serves as a member of the tacl elite reviewer team. roy received his ph.d in computer science from bar-ilan university. before joining ibm, he led nlp research teams in several startup companies. roy delivered a one-hour talk about project debater at the neurips 2018 expo. liat ein-dor is a research staff member at ibm research ai. she received her ph.d in theoretical physics from bar-ilan university in 2001 and has taught several courses there. in 2002 she was a postdoctoral fellow in laboratoire de physique théorique de l'ecole normale supérieure paris, and from 2003 to 2006 she was a postdoctoral fellow and a research consultant at the weizmann institute of science. since 2006, liat has been working as a research scientist in the hi-tech industry, and joined ibm's haifa research lab in 2010. she has been leading research activities within project debater on tasks such as semantic similarity and argumentation mining. she has a diverse background in machine learning, having worked on a variety of domains including computational linguistics, computational biology, fraud detection and theoretical physics. she has publications in all these fields. matan orbach is a research staff member at ibm research ai. since joining ibm in 2014, he has worked on a diverse set of nlp tasks, recently focusing on multilingual stance detection and targeted sentiment analysis. within project debater, matan has led a team working on rebuttal generation through the use of principled arguments. prior to joining ibm, he received his m.sc. from the faculty of electrical engineering at the technion, where his research focused on graph-based semisupervised learning. elad venezian is a research staff member at ibm research ai. he is currently the chief architect of project debater with a focus on making project debater technologies available to academia and business. prior to this role, elad served in different technical and leadership roles in the project debater grand challenge, among them, leading the speech generation team. elad received his m.sc. from the faculty of electrical engineering at the tel aviv university, where his research focused on non-linear systems. noam slonim is a distinguished engineer at ibm research ai. he received his doctorate from the interdisciplinary center for neural computation at the hebrew university and held a post-doc position at the genomics institute at princeton university. noam proposed to develop project debater in 2011. he has been serving as the principal investigator of the project since then. noam published around 60 peer reviewed articles, focusing on the last few years on advancing the emerging field of computational argumentation. noam initiated and co-organized the acl-2016 tutorial on nlp approaches to computational argumentation and the 2015 dagstuhl workshop on debating technologies. in emnlp 2018 he co-chaired the argument mining workshop. noam delivered a keynote speech on project debater at emnlp 2019.