"Nice Try, Kiddo": Investigating Ad Hominems in Dialogue Responses

Understand

Ad hominem attacks are those that target some feature of a person's character instead of the position the person is maintaining.

• These attacks are harmful because they propagate implicit biases and diminish a person's credibility.
• Since dialogue systems respond directly to user input, it is important to study ad hominems in dialogue responses.
• To this end, we propose categories of ad hominems, compose an annotated dataset, and build a classifier to analyze human and dialogue system responses to English Twitter posts.