Contrastive Reasons Detection and Clustering from Online Polarized Debate

Abstract: This work tackles the problem of unsupervised modeling and extraction of the main contrastive sentential reasons conveyed by divergent viewpoints on polarized issues. It proposes a pipeline approach centered around the detection and clustering of phrases, assimilated to argument facets using a novel Phrase Author Interaction Topic-Viewpoint model. The evaluation is based on the informativeness, the relevance and the clustering accuracy of extracted reasons. The pipeline approach shows a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods in contrastive summarization on online debate datasets.