# Determining Relative Argument Specificity and Stance for Complex Argumentative Structures

## TL;DR

This paper introduces methods to determine claim stance and specificity within complex argument structures, using a large dataset of argument trees across diverse topics, revealing insights into how claim relationships affect these determinations.

## Contribution

It presents a new dataset of complex argument trees and analyzes how claim distance impacts stance and specificity detection in argument structures.

## Key findings

- Determining claim specificity is easier with increased claim distance.
- Assessing claim stance becomes more difficult as claim distance increases.
- The dataset covers 95,312 claims across 741 controversial topics.

## Abstract

Systems for automatic argument generation and debate require the ability to (1) determine the stance of any claims employed in the argument and (2) assess the specificity of each claim relative to the argument context. Existing work on understanding claim specificity and stance, however, has been limited to the study of argumentative structures that are relatively shallow, most often consisting of a single claim that directly supports or opposes the argument thesis. In this paper, we tackle these tasks in the context of complex arguments on a diverse set of topics. In particular, our dataset consists of manually curated argument trees for 741 controversial topics covering 95,312 unique claims; lines of argument are generally of depth 2 to 6. We find that as the distance between a pair of claims increases along the argument path, determining the relative specificity of a pair of claims becomes easier and determining their relative stance becomes harder.