Prove Your Point!: Bringing Proof-Enhancement Principles to Argumentative Essay Generation

Ruiyu Xiao, Lei Wu, Yuhang Gou, Weinan Zhang, Ting Liu


Abstract
Argumentative essay generation (AEG) aims to generate complete texts on specific controversial topics or debates. Although current AEG methods can generate individual opinions, they often overlook the high-level connections between these opinions. This often leads to the generated results being mired in logical confusion, unable to proof their own arguments effectively. The generated essay may present evidence that contradicts the claims or they may fail to assemble the claims into logical flow. In this paper, we present a unified two-stage framework: Proof-Enhancement and Self-Annotation (PESA) for AEG with a focus on logical enhancement. Specifically, we first construct pseudo-labels for logical information,claims and grounds, using a large language model. We then propose a tree planning approach that introduces proof principles and ensures logical consistency. Extensive experimental results show that, benefiting from proof principle guidance, PESA generates argumentative essays with better logical validity and persuasiveness than strong baseline models.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1058
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18995–19008
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1058
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruiyu Xiao, Lei Wu, Yuhang Gou, Weinan Zhang, and Ting Liu. 2024. Prove Your Point!: Bringing Proof-Enhancement Principles to Argumentative Essay Generation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 18995–19008, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prove Your Point!: Bringing Proof-Enhancement Principles to Argumentative Essay Generation (Xiao et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1058.pdf