Common Round: Application of Language Technologies to Large-Scale Web Debates

Abstract

Web debates play an important role in enabling broad participation of constituencies in social, political and economic decision-taking. However, it is challenging to organize, structure, and navigate a vast number of diverse argumentations and comments collected from many participants over a long time period. In this paper we demonstrate Common Round, a next generation platform for large-scale web debates, which provides functions for eliciting the semantic content and structures from the contributions of participants. In particular, Common Round applies language technologies for the extraction of semantic essence from textual input, aggregation of the formulated opinions and arguments. The platform also provides a cross-lingual access to debates using machine translation.

Semi-Supervised Cleansing of Web Argument Corpora

“…Computational argumentation research lays the ground for applications that support opinion formation, including argument search engines (Wachsmuth et al, 2017b), collective deliberation (Uszkoreit et al, 2017), and debating technologies (Toledo et al, 2019). Such applications rely on large pools of up-to-date arguments, which can hardly be found anywere but on the web.…”