Flee the Flaw: Annotating the Underlying Logic of Fallacious Arguments Through Templates and Slot-filling

Irfan Robbani, Paul Reisert, Surawat Pothong, Naoya Inoue, Camélia Guerraoui, Wenzhi Wang, Shoichi Naito, Jungmin Choi, Kentaro Inui

Abstract: Prior research in computational argumentation has mainly focused on scoring the quality of arguments, with less attention on explicating logical errors. In this work, we introduce four sets of explainable templates for common informal logical fallacies designed to explicate a fallacy’s implicit logic. Using our templates, we conduct an annotation study on top of 400 fallacious arguments taken from LOGIC dataset and achieve a high agreement score (Krippendorf’s 𝛼 of 0.54) and reasonable coverage 83%. Finally, we conduct an experiment for detecting the structure of fallacies and discover that state-of-the-art language models struggle with detecting fallacy templates (0.47 accuracy). To facilitate research on fallacies, we make our dataset and guidelines publicly available.