Show me your evidence - An automatic method for context dependent evidence detection

Abstract

Engaging in a debate with oneself or others to take decisions is an integral part of our day-today life. A debate on a topic (say, use of performance enhancing drugs) typically proceeds by one party making an assertion/claim (say, PEDs are bad for health) and then providing an evidence to support the claim (say, a 2006 study shows that PEDs have psychiatric side effects). In this work, we propose the task of automatically detecting such evidences from unstructured text that support a given claim. This task has many practical applications in decision support and persuasion enhancement in a wide range of domains. We first introduce an extensive benchmark data set taiiored for this task, which aifows training statisticai modefs and assessing their performance. Then, we suggest a system architecture based on supervised ieaming to address the evidence detection task. Finaify, promising experimentai resufts are reported.