Argument Extraction for Key Point Generation Using MMR-Based Methods

When people debate, they want to familiarize themselves with a whole range of arguments about a given topic in order to deepen their knowledge and inspire new claims. However, the amount of differently phrased arguments is humongous, making the process of processing them time-consuming. In spite of many works on using arguments (e.g. counter-argument generation), there is only a few studies on argument aggregation. To address this problem, we propose a new task in argument mining – Argument Extraction, which gathers similar arguments into
key points
, usually single sentences describing a set of arguments for a given debate topic. Such a short summary of related arguments has been manually created in previous research, while in our research key point generation becomes fully automatic, saving time and cost. As the first step of key point generation we explore existing similarity calculation methods, i.e. Sentence-BERT and MoverScore to investigate their performance. Next, we propose a combination of argument similarity and Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) for extracting key phrases to be utilized in our novel task of Argument Extraction. Experimental results show that MoverScore-based MMR outperforms strong baselines covering 72.5% of arguments when eleven or more arguments are extracted. This percentage is almost identical with the cover rate of human-made key points.