Arguments as Social Good: Good Arguments in Times of Crisis

We report on a case study about extracting natural language arguments from news media to support decision-making in crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, we seek to detect the latest pro- and con-arguments and their trend for crisis relevant topics with the help of a combination of retrieval and machine learning. We present a prototype system that is able to uncover decision critical information about a broad range of topics. Manual analysis shows that the fully automatic system is able to retrieve arguments in real-time and with high quality. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors.