Efficient Pairwise Annotation of Argument Quality

Abstract

We present an efficient annotation framework for argument quality, a feature difficult to be measured reliably as per previous work. A stochastic transitivity model is combined with an effective sampling strategy to infer highquality labels with low effort from crowdsourced pairwise judgments. The model's capabilities are showcased by compiling Webis-ArgQuality-20, an argument quality corpus that comprises scores for rhetorical, logical, dialectical, and overall quality inferred from a total of 41,859 pairwise judgments among 1,271 arguments. With up to 93% cost savings, our approach significantly outperforms existing annotation procedures. Furthermore, novel insight into argument quality is provided through statistical analysis, and a new aggregation method to infer overall quality from individual quality dimensions is proposed.