Employing Argumentation Knowledge Graphs for Neural Argument Generation

Khalid Al Khatib, Lukas Trautner, Henning Wachsmuth, Yufang Hou, Benno Stein


Abstract
Generating high-quality arguments, while being challenging, may benefit a wide range of downstream applications, such as writing assistants and argument search engines. Motivated by the effectiveness of utilizing knowledge graphs for supporting general text generation tasks, this paper investigates the usage of argumentation-related knowledge graphs to control the generation of arguments. In particular, we construct and populate three knowledge graphs, employing several compositions of them to encode various knowledge into texts of debate portals and relevant paragraphs from Wikipedia. Then, the texts with the encoded knowledge are used to fine-tune a pre-trained text generation model, GPT-2. We evaluate the newly created arguments manually and automatically, based on several dimensions important in argumentative contexts, including argumentativeness and plausibility. The results demonstrate the positive impact of encoding the graphs’ knowledge into debate portal texts for generating arguments with superior quality than those generated without knowledge.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.366
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4744–4754
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.366
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.366
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Khalid Al Khatib, Lukas Trautner, Henning Wachsmuth, Yufang Hou, and Benno Stein. 2021. Employing Argumentation Knowledge Graphs for Neural Argument Generation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4744–4754, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Employing Argumentation Knowledge Graphs for Neural Argument Generation (Al Khatib et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.366.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.366.mp4
Code
 webis-de/ACL-21