Argument mining as a multi-hop generative machine reading comprehension task

Boyang Liu, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro, Sophia Ananiadou


Abstract
Argument mining (AM) is a natural language processing task that aims to generate an argumentative graph given an unstructured argumentative text. An argumentative graph that consists of argumentative components and argumentative relations contains completed information of an argument and exhibits the logic of an argument. As the argument structure of an argumentative text can be regarded as an answer to a “why” question, the whole argument structure is therefore similar to the “chain of thought” concept, i.e., the sequence of ideas that lead to a specific conclusion for a given argument (Wei et al., 2022). For argumentative texts in the same specific genre, the “chain of thought” of such texts is usually similar, i.e., in a student essay, there is usually a major claim supported by several claims, and then a number of premises which are related to the claims are included (Eger et al., 2017). In this paper, we propose a new perspective which transfers the argument mining task into a multi-hop reading comprehension task, allowing the model to learn the argument structure as a “chain of thought”. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our approach on two AM benchmarks and find that we surpass SOTA results. A detailed analysis shows that specifically the “chain of thought” information is helpful for the argument mining task.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.724
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10846–10858
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.724
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.724
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Boyang Liu, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro, and Sophia Ananiadou. 2023. Argument mining as a multi-hop generative machine reading comprehension task. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 10846–10858, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Argument mining as a multi-hop generative machine reading comprehension task (Liu et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2023.findings-emnlp.724.pdf