2021/06/04 by Siyi Liu, Liu, Siyi, Sihao Chen +5
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Software Engineering Research #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.02725
openalex publication_date 2021/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We propose MultiOpEd, an open-domain news editorial corpus that supports various tasks pertaining to the argumentation structure in news editorials, focusing on automatic perspective discovery. News editorial is a genre of persuasive text, where the argumentation structure is usually implicit. However, the arguments presented in an editorial typically center around a concise, focused thesis, which we refer to as their perspective. MultiOpEd aims at supporting the study of multiple tasks relevant to automatic perspective discovery, where a system is expected to produce a single-sentence thesis statement summarizing the arguments presented. We argue that identifying and abstracting such natural language perspectives from editorials is a crucial step toward studying the implicit argumentation structure in news editorials. We first discuss the challenges and define a few conceptual tasks towards our goal. To demonstrate the utility of MultiOpEd and the induced tasks, we study the problem of perspective summarization in a multi-task learning setting, as a case study. We show that, with the induced tasks as auxiliary tasks, we can improve the quality of the perspective summary generated. We hope that MultiOpEd will be a useful resource for future studies on argumentation in the news editorial domain.