CU-MAM: Coherence-Driven Unified Macro-Structures for Argument Mining

Debela Gemechu, Chris Reed


Abstract
Argument Mining (AM) involves the automatic identification of argument structure in natural language. Traditional AM methods rely on micro-structural features derived from the internal properties of individual Argumentative Discourse Units (ADUs). However, argument structure is shaped by a macro-structure capturing the functional interdependence among ADUs. This macro-structure consists of segments, where each segment contains ADUs that fulfill specific roles to maintain coherence within the segment (**local coherence**) and across segments (**global coherence**). This paper presents an approach that models macro-structure, capturing both local and global coherence to identify argument structures. Experiments on heterogeneous datasets demonstrate superior performance in both in-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations. The cross-dataset evaluation shows that macro-structure enhances transferability to unseen datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.969
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19731–19749
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.969/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Debela Gemechu and Chris Reed. 2025. CU-MAM: Coherence-Driven Unified Macro-Structures for Argument Mining. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 19731–19749, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CU-MAM: Coherence-Driven Unified Macro-Structures for Argument Mining (Gemechu & Reed, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.969.pdf