End-to-End Argument Mining as Augmented Natural Language Generation

Abstract: Argument Mining (AM) is a crucial aspect of computational argumentation, which deals with the identification and extraction of Argumentative Components (ACs) and their corresponding Argumentative Relations (ARs). Most prior works have solved these problems by dividing them into multiple subtasks. And the available end-to-end setups are mostly based on the dependency parsing approach. This work proposes a unified end-to-end framework based on a generative paradigm, in which the argumentative structures are framed into label-augmented text, called Augmented Natural Language (ANL). Additionally, we explore the role of different types of markers in solving AM tasks. Through different marker-based fine-tuning strategies, we present an extensive study by integrating marker knowledge into our generative model. The proposed framework achieves competitive results to the state-of-the-art (SoTA) model and outperforms several baselines.