Do Discourse Indicators Reflect the Main Arguments in Scientific Papers?

Yingqiang Gao, Nianlong Gu, Jessica Lam, Richard H.R. Hahnloser


Abstract
In scientific papers, arguments are essential for explaining authors’ findings. As substrates of the reasoning process, arguments are often decorated with discourse indicators such as “which shows that” or “suggesting that”. However, it remains understudied whether discourse indicators by themselves can be used as an effective marker of the local argument components (LACs) in the body text that support the main claim in the abstract, i.e., the global argument. In this work, we investigate whether discourse indicators reflect the global premise and conclusion. We construct a set of regular expressions for over 100 word- and phrase-level discourse indicators and measure the alignment of LACs extracted by discourse indicators with the global arguments. We find a positive correlation between the alignment of local premises and local conclusions. However, compared to a simple textual intersection baseline, discourse indicators achieve lower ROUGE recall and have limited capability of extracting LACs relevant to the global argument; thus their role in scientific reasoning is less salient as expected.
Anthology ID:
2022.argmining-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Online and in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Gabriella Lapesa, Jodi Schneider, Yohan Jo, Sougata Saha
Venue:
ArgMining
SIG:
Publisher:
International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
34–50
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.argmining-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yingqiang Gao, Nianlong Gu, Jessica Lam, and Richard H.R. Hahnloser. 2022. Do Discourse Indicators Reflect the Main Arguments in Scientific Papers?. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining, pages 34–50, Online and in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do Discourse Indicators Reflect the Main Arguments in Scientific Papers? (Gao et al., ArgMining 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.argmining-1.3.pdf
Code
 charizardacademy/discourse-indicator
Data
S2ORC