Despite extensive research efforts in recent years, computational argumentation (CA) remains one of the most challenging areas of natural language processing. The reason for this is the inherent complexity of the cognitive processes behind human argumentation, which integrate a plethora of different types of knowledge, ranging from topic-specific facts and common sense to rhetorical knowledge. The integration of knowledge from such a wide range in CA requires modeling capabilities far beyond many other natural language understanding tasks. Existing research on mining, assessing, reasoning over, and generating arguments largely acknowledges that much more knowledge is needed to accurately model argumentation computationally. However, a systematic overview of the types of knowledge introduced in existing CA models is missing, hindering targeted progress in the field. Adopting the operational definition of knowledge as any task-relevant normative information not provided as input, the survey paper at hand fills this gap by (1) proposing a taxonomy of types of knowledge required in CA tasks, (2) systematizing the large body of CA work according to the reliance on and exploitation of these knowledge types for the four main research areas in CA, and (3) outlining and discussing directions for future research efforts in CA.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown to be valuable tools for tackling process mining tasks. Existing studies report on their capability to support various data-driven process analyses and even, to some extent, that they are able to reason about how processes work. This reasoning ability suggests that there is potential for LLMs to tackle semantics-aware process mining tasks, which are tasks that rely on an understanding of the meaning of activities and their relationships. Examples of these include process discovery, where the meaning of activities can indicate their dependency, whereas in anomaly detection the meaning can be used to recognize process behavior that is abnormal. In this paper, we systematically explore the capabilities of LLMs for such tasks. Unlike prior work, which largely evaluates LLMs in their default state, we investigate their utility through both in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Concretely, we define five process mining tasks requiring semantic understanding and provide extensive benchmarking datasets for evaluation. Our experiments reveal that while LLMs struggle with challenging process mining tasks when used out of the box or with minimal in-context examples, they achieve strong performance when fine-tuned for these tasks across a broad range of process types and industries.

Andreea Iana, Goran Glavaš, Heiko Paulheim. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024. 2024.

Andreea Iana, Goran Glavaš, Heiko Paulheim. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations. 2023.

During the past 15 years, automatic text scaling has become one of the key tools of the Text as Data community in political science. Prominent text-scaling algorithms, however, rely on the assumption that latent positions can be captured just by leveraging the information about word frequencies in documents under study. We challenge this traditional view and present a new, semantically aware text-scaling algorithm, SemScale , which combines recent developments in the area of computational linguistics with unsupervised graph-based clustering. We conduct an extensive quantitative analysis over a collection of speeches from the European Parliament in five different languages and from two different legislative terms, and we show that a scaling approach relying on semantic document representations is often better at capturing known underlying political dimensions than the established frequency-based (i.e., symbolic) scaling method. We further validate our findings through a series of experiments focused on text preprocessing and feature selection, document representation, scaling of party manifestos, and a supervised extension of our algorithm. To catalyze further research on this new branch of text-scaling methods, we release a Python implementation of SemScale with all included datasets and evaluation procedures.