# How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08353 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08353/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08914/) (2016)
- [Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05345/) (2018)
- [Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01362/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Multi-label Text Classification - Revisiting Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5419/) (2013)
- [Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09085/) (2017)
- [I Beg to Differ: A study of constructive disagreement in online conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10917/) (2021)
- [Conversational Markers of Constructive Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07407/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [What Can Natural Language Processing Do for Peer Review?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06563/) (2024)
- [An LLM Feature-based Framework for Dialogue Constructiveness Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14760/) (2024)
- [Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01513/) (2025)
- [Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14501/) (2025)
- [To Facilitate or not to Facilitate: Human and LLM Facilitator Tendencies in Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28643/) (2026)
- [Causal Effects of Trigger Words in Social Media Discussions: A Large-Scale Case Study about UK Politics on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10213/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Disagreements are frequently studied from the perspective of either detecting toxicity or analysing argument structure. We propose a framework of dispute tactics that unifies these two perspectives, as well as other dialogue acts which play a role in resolving disputes, such as asking questions and providing clarification. This framework includes a preferential ordering among rebuttal-type tactics, ranging from ad hominem attacks to refuting the central argument. Using this framework, we annotate 213 disagreements (3,865 utterances) from Wikipedia Talk pages. This allows us to investigate research questions around the tactics used in disagreements; for instance, we provide empirical validation of the approach to disagreement recommended by Wikipedia. We develop models for multilabel prediction of dispute tactics in an utterance, achieving the best performance with a transformer-based label powerset model. Adding an auxiliary task to incorporate the ordering of rebuttal tactics further yields a statistically significant increase. Finally, we show that these annotations can be used to provide useful additional signals to improve performance on the task of predicting escalation.