English

Neural Argument Generation Augmented with Externally Retrieved Evidence

Computation and Language 2018-05-28 v1

Abstract

High quality arguments are essential elements for human reasoning and decision-making processes. However, effective argument construction is a challenging task for both human and machines. In this work, we study a novel task on automatically generating arguments of a different stance for a given statement. We propose an encoder-decoder style neural network-based argument generation model enriched with externally retrieved evidence from Wikipedia. Our model first generates a set of talking point phrases as intermediate representation, followed by a separate decoder producing the final argument based on both input and the keyphrases. Experiments on a large-scale dataset collected from Reddit show that our model constructs arguments with more topic-relevant content than a popular sequence-to-sequence generation model according to both automatic evaluation and human assessments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.10254,
  title  = {Neural Argument Generation Augmented with Externally Retrieved Evidence},
  author = {Xinyu Hua and Lu Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.10254},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

This paper is accepted as to ACL 2018

R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:08:39.442Z