Julian Lohmann
2024
Transfer Learning of Argument Mining in Student Essays
Yuning Ding
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Julian Lohmann
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Nils-Jonathan Schaller
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Thorben Jansen
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Andrea Horbach
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)
This paper explores the transferability of a cross-prompt argument mining model trained on argumentative essays authored by native English-speaking learners (EN-L1) across educational contexts and languages. Specifically, the adaptability of a multilingual transformer model is assessed through its application to comparable argumentative essays authored by English-as-a-foreign-language learners (EN-L2) for context transfer, and a dataset composed of essays written by native German learners (DE) for both language and task transfer. To separate language effects from educational context effects, we also perform experiments on a machine-translated version of the German dataset (DE-MT). Our findings demonstrate that, even under zero-shot conditions, a model trained on native English speakers exhibits satisfactory performance on the EN-L2/DE datasets. Machine translation does not substantially enhance this performance, suggesting that distinct writing styles across educational contexts impact performance more than language differences.