Abstract
In this paper, we present a novel approach for identifying argumentative discourse structures in persuasive essays. The structure of argumentation consists of several components (i.e. claims and premises) that are connected with argumentative relations. We consider this task in two consecutive steps. First, we identify the components of arguments using multiclass classification. Second, we classify a pair of argument components as either support or non-support for identifying the structure of argumentative discourse. For both tasks, we evaluate several classifiers and propose novel feature sets including structural, lexical, syntactic and contextual features. In our experiments, we obtain a macro F1-score of 0.726 for identifying argument components and 0.722 for argumentative relations.
Highlights
Argumentation is a crucial aspect of writing skills acquisition
In a comparison of several classifiers (Support Vector Machine, Naıve Bayes, C4.5 Decision Tree and Random Forest), we found that each of the classifiers significantly outperforms a majority baseline (McNemar Test (McNemar, 1947) with p = 0.05) and that a Support Vector Machine (SVM) achieves the best results using 100 top features ranked by Information Gain
Since the boundaries of an argument component in the gold standard can differ from the boundaries identified by a human annotator, we label each argument component of the gold standard with the class of the maximum overlapping annotation of a human annotator for determining the human performance
Summary
Argumentation is a crucial aspect of writing skills acquisition. Current writing support is limited to feedback about spelling, grammar, or stylistic properties and there is currently no system that provides feedback about written argumentation. It includes a claim that is supported or attacked by at least one premise. The claim is the central component of an argument. The premise underpins the validity of the claim. It is a reason given by an author for persuading readers of the claim. Argumentative relations model the discourse structure of arguments They indicate which argument components are related and constitute the structure of argumentative discourse. The argument in the following paragraph contains four argument components: one claim (in bold face) and three premises (underlined)
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