Expert Stance Graphs for Computational Argumentation

Abstract

We describe the construction of an Expert Stance Graph, a novel, large-scale knowledge resource that encodes the stance of more than 100,000 experts towards a variety of controversial topics. We suggest that this graph may be valuable for various fundamental tasks in computational argumentation. Experts and topics in our graph are Wikipedia entries. Both automatic and semi-automatic methods for building the graph are explored, and manual assessment validates the high accuracy of the resulting graph.