Isaac Persing


2020

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Unsupervised Argumentation Mining in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

State-of-the-art systems for argumentation mining are supervised, thus relying on training data containing manually annotated argument components and the relationships between them. To eliminate the reliance on annotated data, we present a novel approach to unsupervised argument mining. The key idea is to bootstrap from a small set of argument components automatically identified using simple heuristics in combination with reliable contextual cues. Results on a Stab and Gurevych’s corpus of 402 essays show that our unsupervised approach rivals two supervised baselines in performance and achieves 73.5-83.7% of the performance of a state-of-the-art neural approach.

2017

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Lightly-Supervised Modeling of Argument Persuasiveness
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We propose the first lightly-supervised approach to scoring an argument’s persuasiveness. Key to our approach is the novel hypothesis that lightly-supervised persuasiveness scoring is possible by explicitly modeling the major errors that negatively impact persuasiveness. In an evaluation on a new annotated corpus of online debate arguments, our approach rivals its fully-supervised counterparts in performance by four scoring metrics when using only 10% of the available training instances.

2016

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Modeling Stance in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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End-to-End Argumentation Mining in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2015

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Modeling Argument Strength in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2014

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Modeling Prompt Adherence in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Vote Prediction on Comments in Social Polls
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

2013

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Modeling Thesis Clarity in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2010

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Modeling Organization in Student Essays
Isaac Persing | Alan Davis | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2009

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Semi-Supervised Cause Identification from Aviation Safety Reports
Isaac Persing | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP