Argumentation Synthesis following Rhetorical Strategies

Henning Wachsmuth, Manfred Stede, Roxanne El Baff, Khalid Al-Khatib, Maria Skeppstedt, Benno Stein


Abstract
Persuasion is rarely achieved through a loose set of arguments alone. Rather, an effective delivery of arguments follows a rhetorical strategy, combining logical reasoning with appeals to ethics and emotion. We argue that such a strategy means to select, arrange, and phrase a set of argumentative discourse units. In this paper, we model rhetorical strategies for the computational synthesis of effective argumentation. In a study, we let 26 experts synthesize argumentative texts with different strategies for 10 topics. We find that the experts agree in the selection significantly more when following the same strategy. While the texts notably vary for different strategies, especially their arrangement remains stable. The results suggest that our model enables a strategical synthesis.
Anthology ID:
C18-1318
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3753–3765
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1318
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Henning Wachsmuth, Manfred Stede, Roxanne El Baff, Khalid Al-Khatib, Maria Skeppstedt, and Benno Stein. 2018. Argumentation Synthesis following Rhetorical Strategies. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3753–3765, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Argumentation Synthesis following Rhetorical Strategies (Wachsmuth et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1318.pdf