A Dataset of Argumentative Dialogues on Scientific Papers

With recent advances in question-answering models, various datasets have been collected to improve and study the effectiveness of these models on scientific texts. Questions and answers in these datasets explore a scientific paper by seeking factual information from the paper's content. However, these datasets do not tackle the argumentative content of scientific papers, which is of huge importance in persuasiveness of a scientific discussion. We introduce ArgSciChat, a dataset of 41 argumentative dialogues between scientists on 20 NLP papers. The unique property of our dataset is that it includes both exploratory and argumentative questions and answers in a dialogue discourse on a scientific paper. Moreover, the size of ArgSciChat demonstrates the difficulties in collecting dialogues for specialized domains. Thus, our dataset is a challenging resource to evaluate dialogue agents in low-resource domains, in which collecting training data is costly. We annotate all sentences of dialogues in ArgSciChat and analyze them extensively. The results confirm that dialogues in ArgSci-Chat include exploratory and argumentative interactions. Furthermore, we use our dataset to fine-tune and evaluate a pre-trained documentgrounded dialogue agent. The agent achieves a low performance on our dataset, motivating a need for dialogue agents with a capability to reason and argue about their answers. We publicly release ArgSciChat 1 .