AMERICANO: Argument Generation with Discourse-driven Decomposition and Agent Interaction

Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Yu Yin


Abstract
Argument generation is a challenging task in natural language processing, which requires rigorous reasoning and proper content organization. Inspired by recent chain-of-thought prompting that breaks down a complex task into intermediate steps, we propose Americano, a novel framework with agent interaction for argument generation. Our approach decomposes the generation process into sequential actions grounded on argumentation theory, which first executes actions sequentially to generate argumentative discourse components, and then produces a final argument conditioned on the components. To further mimic the human writing process and improve the left-to-right generation paradigm of current autoregressive language models, we introduce an argument refinement module that automatically evaluates and refines argument drafts based on feedback received. We evaluate our framework on the task of counterargument generation using a subset of Reddit/CMV dataset. The results show that our method outperforms both end-to-end and chain-of-thought prompting methods and can generate more coherent and persuasive arguments with diverse and rich contents.
Anthology ID:
2024.inlg-main.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Tokyo, Japan
Editors:
Saad Mahamood, Nguyen Le Minh, Daphne Ippolito
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
82–102
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.inlg-main.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, and Yu Yin. 2024. AMERICANO: Argument Generation with Discourse-driven Decomposition and Agent Interaction. In Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 82–102, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AMERICANO: Argument Generation with Discourse-driven Decomposition and Agent Interaction (Hu et al., INLG 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.inlg-main.8.pdf