EDU-AP: Elementary Discourse Unit based Argument Parser

Abstract

Neural approaches to end-to-end argument mining (AM) are often formulated as dependency parsing (DP), which relies on token-level sequence labeling and intricate post-processing for extracting argumentative structures from text. Although such methods yield reasonable results, operating solely with tokens increases the possibility of discontinuous and overly segmented structures due to minor inconsistencies in token level predictions. In this paper, we propose EDU-AP, an end-to-end argument parser, that alleviates such problems in dependency-based methods by exploiting the intrinsic relationship between elementary discourse units (EDUs) and argumentative discourse units (ADUs) and operates at both token and EDU level granularity. Further, appropriately using contextual information, along with optimizing a novel objective function during training, EDU-AP achieves significant improvements across all four tasks of AM compared to existing dependency-based methods.