Topic-Guided Knowledge Graph Construction for Argument Mining

Weichen Li, Patrick Abels, Zahra Ahmadi, Sophie Burkhardt, Benjamin Schiller, Iryna Gurevych, Stefan Kramer

Abstract: Decision-making tasks usually follow five steps: identifying the problem, collecting data, extracting evidence, iden-tifying arguments, and making the decision. This paper focuses on two steps of decision-making: extracting evidence by building knowledge graphs (KGs) of specialized topics and identifying sentences' arguments through sentence-level argument mining. We present a hybrid model that combines topic modeling using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and word embeddings to obtain external knowledge from structured and unstructured data. We use a topic model to extract topic- and sentence-specific evidence from the structured knowledge base Wikidata. A knowledge graph is constructed based on the cosine similarity between the entity word vectors of Wikidata and the vector of the given sentence. A second graph based on topic-specific articles found via Google supplements the general incompleteness of the structured knowledge base. Combining these graphs, we obtain a graph-based model that, as our evaluation shows, successfully capitalizes on both structured and unstructured data.