AMPERSAND: Argument Mining for PERSuAsive oNline Discussions

Tuhin Chakrabarty, Christopher Hidey, Smaranda Muresan, Kathy McKeown, Alyssa Hwang

Abstract
Argumentation is a type of discourse where speakers try to persuade their audience about the reasonableness of a claim by presenting supportive arguments. Most work in argument mining has focused on modeling arguments in monologues. We propose a computational model for argument mining in online persuasive discussion forums that brings together the micro-level (argument as product) and macro-level (argument as process) models of argumentation. Fundamentally, this approach relies on identifying relations between components of arguments in a discussion thread. Our approach for relation prediction uses contextual information in terms of fine-tuning a pre-trained language model and leveraging discourse relations based on Rhetorical Structure Theory. We additionally propose a candidate selection method to automatically predict what parts of one’s argument will be targeted by other participants in the discussion. Our models obtain significant improvements compared to recent state-of-the-art approaches using pointer networks and a pre-trained language model.
Anthology ID:
D19-1291
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2933–2943
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1291
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1291
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tuhin Chakrabarty, Christopher Hidey, Smaranda Muresan, Kathy McKeown, and Alyssa Hwang. 2019. AMPERSAND: Argument Mining for PERSuAsive oNline Discussions. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2933–2943, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AMPERSAND: Argument Mining for PERSuAsive oNline Discussions (Chakrabarty et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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