A Generative Approach to Argument Structure Extraction

The goal of argument mining, or AM, is to identify the argumentative structures in a document. Prior approaches necessitate a number of subtasks, including component classification, relation classification, and span identification. Therefore, rule-based postprocessing is required for these methods to extract generative structures from each subtask’s output. This method increases the model’s complexity and broadens the hyperparameter search space. We suggest a straightforward yet effective technique based on a text-to-text generation strategy employing a pretrained encoder-decoder language model to overcome this challenge. Our approach eliminates the requirement for task-specific postprocessing and hyperparameter optimisation by producing argumentatively annotated text for spans, components, and relations all at once. Additionally, as it is a simple text-to-text creation method, we may readily modify our strategy to fit different kinds of argumentative frameworks. Experimental findings show that our strategy works well, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three distinct benchmark datasets: the Cornell eRulemaking Cor- pus (CDCP), AbstRCT and the Argument-annotated Essays Corpus (AAEC).