With the recent advances of large language models (LLMs), it is no longer infeasible to build an automated debate system that helps people to synthesise persuasive arguments. Previous work attempted this task by integrating multiple components. In our work, we introduce an argument mining dataset that captures the end-to-end process of preparing an argumentative essay for a debate, which covers the tasks of claim and evidence identification (Task 1 ED), evidence convincingness ranking (Task 2 ECR), argumentative essay summarisation and human preference ranking (Task 3 ASR) and metric learning for automated evaluation of resulting essays, based on human feedback along argument quality dimensions (Task 4 SQE). Our dataset contains 14k examples of claims that are fully annotated with various properties supporting the aforementioned tasks. We evaluate multiple generative baselines for each of these tasks, including representative LLMs. We find, that while they show promising results on individual tasks in our benchmark, their end-to-end performance on all four tasks in succession deteriorates significantly, both in automated measures as well as in human-centred evaluation. This challenge presented by our proposed dataset motivates future research on end-to-end argument mining and summarisation. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/HarrywillDr/ArgSum-Datatset.

Medical progress notes play a crucial role in documenting a patient’s hospital journey, including his or her condition, treatment plan, and any updates for healthcare providers. Automatic summarisation of a patient’s problems in the form of a “problem list” can aid stakeholders in understanding a patient’s condition, reducing workload and cognitive bias. BioNLP 2023 Shared Task 1A focusses on generating a list of diagnoses and problems from the provider’s progress notes during hospitalisation. In this paper, we introduce our proposed approach to this task, which integrates two complementary components. One component employs large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation; the other is an abstractive summarisation LLM with a novel pre-training objective for generating the patients’ problems summarised as a list. Our approach was ranked second among all submissions to the shared task. The performance of our model on the development and test datasets shows that our approach is more robust on unknown data, with an improvement of up to 3.1 points over the same size of the larger model.

Extractive models usually formulate text summarization as extracting fixed top-k salient sentences from the document as a summary. Few works exploited extracting finer-grained Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU) with little analysis and justification for the extractive unit selection. Further, the selection strategy of the fixed top-k salient sentences fits the summarization need poorly, as the number of salient sentences in different documents varies and therefore a common or best k does not exist in reality. To fill these gaps, this paper first conducts the comparison analysis of oracle summaries based on EDUs and sentences, which provides evidence from both theoretical and experimental perspectives to justify and quantify that EDUs make summaries with higher automatic evaluation scores than sentences. Then, considering this merit of EDUs, this paper further proposes an EDU-level extractive model with Varying summary Lengths (EDU-VL) and develops the corresponding learning algorithm. EDU-VL learns to encode and predict probabilities of EDUs in the document, generate multiple candidate summaries with varying lengths based on various k values, and encode and score candidate summaries, in an end-to-end training manner. Finally, EDU-VL is experimented on single and multi-document benchmark datasets and shows improved performances on ROUGE scores in comparison with state-of-the-art extractive models, and further human evaluation suggests that EDU-constituent summaries maintain good grammaticality and readability.