{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/spurious-correlations-in-cross-topic-argument","title":"Spurious Correlations in Cross-Topic Argument Mining","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-08-01","proceeding":"Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics 2021","authors":["Terne Sasha Thorn Jakobsen","Maria Barrett","Anders S{\\o}gaard"],"abstract":"Recent work in cross-topic argument mining attempts to learn models that generalise across topics rather than merely relying on within-topic spurious correlations. We examine the effectiveness of this approach by analysing the output of single-task and multi-task models for cross-topic argument mining, through a combination of linear approximations of their decision boundaries, manual feature grouping, challenge examples, and ablations across the input vocabulary. Surprisingly, we show that cross-topic models still rely mostly on spurious correlations and only generalise within closely related topics, e.g., a model trained only on closed-class words and a few common open-class words outperforms a state-of-the-art cross-topic model on distant target topics.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.starsem-1.25","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.starsem-1.25.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"spurious-correlations-in-cross-topic-argument","repo_url":"https://github.com/terne/spurious_correlations_in_argmin","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"argument-mining","task_name":"Argument Mining"},{"task_slug":"topic-models","task_name":"Topic Models"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}