Towards an argumentative content search engine using weak supervision

Searching for sentences containing claims in a large text corpus is a key component in developing an argumentative content search engine. Previous works focused on detecting claims in a small set of documents or within documents enriched with argumentative content. However, pinpointing relevant claims in massive unstructured corpora, received little attention. A step in this direction was taken in (Levy et al., 2017), where the authors suggested using a weak signal to develop a relatively strict query for claim–sentence detection. Here, we leverage this work to define weak signals for training DNNs to obtain significantly greater performance. This approach allows to relax the query and increase the potential coverage. Our results clearly indicate that the system is able to successfully generalize from the weak signal, outperforming previously reported results in terms of both precision and coverage. Finally, we adapt our system to solve a recent argument mining task of identifying argumentative sentences in Web texts retrieved from heterogeneous sources, and obtain F₁ scores comparable to the supervised baseline.