Team Skeletor at Touché 2021: Argument Retrieval and Visualization for Controversial Questions

Arguments are a critical part of education and political discourse in society, especially since more and more information is available online. In order to access this information, argument retrieval is a necessary task. In this work, we leverage the existing techniques of BM25 and BERT-based passage embedding similarity and introduce a new information retrieval technique based on manifold approximation. Evaluation results on the Touché @ CLEF 2021 topics and relevance scores show that the manifold-based approximation helps discover higher-quality arguments. Furthermore, we use these retrieval methods to visualize argument progression for users watching debates. The visualization results show promising directions for future exploration.