Argumentative Relation Classification is the task of determining the relationship between two contributions in the context of an argumentative dialogue. Existing models in the literature rely on a combination of lexical features and pre-trained language models to tackle this task; while this approach is somewhat effective, it fails to take into account the importance of pragmatic features such as the illocutionary force of the argument or the structure of previous utterances in the discussion; relying solely on lexical features also produces models that over-fit their initial training set and do not scale to unseen domains. In this work, we introduce ArguNet, a new model for Argumentative Relation Classification which relies on a combination of Dialogue Acts and Dialogue Context to improve the representation of argument structures in opinionated dialogues. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the Kialo benchmark test set, and provide evidence of its robustness in an open-domain scenario.

Dialogue Act tagging with the ISO 24617-2 standard is a difficult task that involves multi-label text classification across a diverse set of labels covering semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of dialogue. The lack of an adequately sized training set annotated with this standard is a major problem when using the standard in practice. In this work we propose a neural architecture to increase classification accuracy, especially on low-frequency fine-grained tags. Our model takes advantage of the hierarchical structure of the ISO taxonomy and utilises syntactic information in the form of Part-Of-Speech and dependency tags, in addition to contextual information from previous turns. We train our architecture on an aggregated corpus of conversations from different domains, which provides a variety of dialogue interactions and linguistic registers. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art tagging results on the DialogBank benchmark data set, providing empirical evidence that this architecture can successfully generalise to different domains.