Enhancing Argument Structure Extraction with Efficient Leverage of Contextual Information

Yun Luo, Zhen Yang, Fandong Meng, Yingjie Li, Jie Zhou, Yue Zhang


Abstract
Argument structure extraction (ASE) aims to identify the discourse structure of arguments within documents. Previous research has demonstrated that contextual information is crucial for developing an effective ASE model. However, we observe that merely concatenating sentences in a contextual window does not fully utilize contextual information and can sometimes lead to excessive attention on less informative sentences. To tackle this challenge, we propose an Efficient Context-aware ASE model (ECASE) that fully exploits contextual information by enhancing modeling capacity and augmenting training data. Specifically, we introduce a sequence-attention module and distance-weighted similarity loss to aggregate contextual information and argumentative information. Additionally, we augment the training data by randomly masking discourse markers and sentences, which reduces the model’s reliance on specific words or less informative sentences. Our experiments on five datasets from various domains demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each module in our model.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.507
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7563–7571
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.507
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.507
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yun Luo, Zhen Yang, Fandong Meng, Yingjie Li, Jie Zhou, and Yue Zhang. 2023. Enhancing Argument Structure Extraction with Efficient Leverage of Contextual Information. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 7563–7571, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Argument Structure Extraction with Efficient Leverage of Contextual Information (Luo et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.507.pdf