GESIS-DSM at PerpectiveArg2024: A Matter of Style? Socio-Cultural Differences in Argumentation

AbstractThis paper describes the contribution of team GESIS-DSM to the Perspective Argument Retrieval Task, a task on retrieving socio-culturally relevant and diverse arguments for different user queries. Our experiments and analyses aim to explore the nature of the socio-cultural specialization in argument retrieval: (how) do the arguments written by different socio-cultural groups differ? We investigate the impact of content and style for the task of identifying arguments relevant to a query and a certain demographic attribute. In its different configurations, our system employs sentence embedding representations, arguments generated with Large Language Model, as well as stylistic features. final method places third overall in the shared task, and, in comparison, does particularly well in the most difficult evaluation scenario, where the socio-cultural background of the argument author is implicit (i.e. has to be inferred from the text). This result indicates that socio-cultural differences in argument production may indeed be a matter of style.