Argument pair extraction (APE) aims to automatically mine argument pairs from two interrelated argumentative documents. Existing studies typically identify argument pairs indirectly by predicting sentence-level relations between two documents, neglecting the modeling of the holistic argument-level interactions. Towards this issue, we propose to address APE via a machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework with two phases. The first phase employs an argument mining (AM) query to identify all arguments in two documents. The second phase considers each identified argument as an APE query to extract its paired arguments from another document, allowing to better capture the argument-level interactions. Also, this framework enables these two phases to be jointly trained in a single MRC model, thereby maximizing the mutual benefits of them. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves the best performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by 7.11% in F1 score.

The goal of argumentation mining is to automatically extract argumentation structures from argumentative texts. Most existing methods determine argumentative relations by exhaustively enumerating all possible pairs of argument components, which suffer from low efficiency and class imbalance. Moreover, due to the complex nature of argumentation, there is, so far, no universal method that can address both tree and non-tree structured argumentation. Towards these issues, we propose a neural transition-based model for argumentation mining, which incrementally builds an argumentation graph by generating a sequence of actions, avoiding inefficient enumeration operations. Furthermore, our model can handle both tree and non-tree structured argumentation without introducing any structural constraints. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best performance on two public datasets of different structures.

Argument pair extraction (APE) aims to extract interactive argument pairs from two passages of a discussion. Previous work studied this task in the context of peer review and rebuttal, and decomposed it into a sequence labeling task and a sentence relation classification task. However, despite the promising performance, such an approach obtains the argument pairs implicitly by the two decomposed tasks, lacking explicitly modeling of the argument-level interactions between argument pairs. In this paper, we tackle the APE task by a mutual guidance framework, which could utilize the information of an argument in one passage to guide the identification of arguments that can form pairs with it in another passage. In this manner, two passages can mutually guide each other in the process of APE. Furthermore, we propose an inter-sentence relation graph to effectively model the inter-relations between two sentences and thus facilitates the extraction of argument pairs. Our proposed method can better represent the holistic argument-level semantics and thus explicitly capture the complex correlations between argument pairs. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art model.

The task of emotion-cause pair extraction deals with finding all emotions and the corresponding causes in unannotated emotion texts. Most recent studies are based on the likelihood of Cartesian product among all clause candidates, resulting in a high computational cost. Targeting this issue, we regard the task as a sequence labeling problem and propose a novel tagging scheme with coding the distance between linked components into the tags, so that emotions and the corresponding causes can be extracted simultaneously. Accordingly, an end-to-end model is presented to process the input texts from left to right, always with linear time complexity, leading to a speed up. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves the best performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by 2.26% (p<0.001) in F1 measure.