High quality arguments are essential elements for human reasoning and decision-making processes. However, effective argument construction is a challenging task for both human and machines. In this work, we study a novel task on automatically generating arguments of a different stance for a given statement. We propose an encoder-decoder style neural network-based argument generation model enriched with externally retrieved evidence from Wikipedia. Our model first generates a set of talking point phrases as intermediate representation, followed by a separate decoder producing the final argument based on both input and the keyphrases. Experiments on a large-scale dataset collected from Reddit show that our model constructs arguments with more topic-relevant content than popular sequence-to-sequence generation models according to automatic evaluation and human assessments.
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ArgU: A Controllable Factual Argument Generator
Effective argumentation is essential towards a purposeful conversation with a satisfactory outcome. For example, persuading someone to reconsider smoking might involve empathetic, well founded arguments based on facts and expert opinions about its ill-effects and the consequences on one’s family. However, the automatic generation of high-quality factual arguments can be challenging. Addressing existing controllability issues can make the recent advances in computational models for argument generation a potential solution. In this paper, we introduce ArgU: a neural argument generator capable of producing factual arguments from input facts and real-world concepts that can be explicitly controlled for stance and argument structure using Walton’s argument scheme-based control codes. Unfortunately, computational argument generation is a relatively new field and lacks datasets conducive to training. Hence, we have compiled and released an annotated corpora of 69,428 arguments spanning six topics and six argument schemes, making it the largest publicly available corpus for identifying argument schemes; the paper details our annotation and dataset creation framework. We further experiment with an argument generation strategy that establishes an inference strategy by generating an “argument template” before actual argument generation. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to automatically generate diverse arguments exhibiting different inference patterns for the same set of facts by using control codes based on argument schemes and stance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2214070
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10441736
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of ACL 2023
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 8373 to 8388
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.466
