Argumentation Synthesis following Rhetorical Strategies

authored by

Henning Wachsmuth, Manfred Stede, Roxanne El Baff, Khalid Al-Khatib, Maria Skeppstedt, Benno Stein

Abstract

Persuasion is rarely achieved through a loose set of arguments alone. Rather, an effective delivery of arguments follows a rhetorical strategy, combining logical reasoning with appeals to ethics and emotion. We argue that such a strategy means to select, arrange, and phrase a set of argumentative discourse units. In this paper, we model rhetorical strategies for the computational synthesis of effective argumentation. In a study, we let 26 experts synthesize argumentative texts with different strategies for 10 topics. We find that the experts agree in the selection significantly more when following the same strategy. While the texts notably vary for different strategies, especially their arrangement remains stable. The results suggest that our model enables a strategical synthesis.

External Organisation(s)

Paderborn University
University of Potsdam
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Linnaeus University

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

3753-3765

No. of pages

13

Publication date

08.2018

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Linguistics and Language

Electronic version(s)

https://aclanthology.org/C18-1318 (Access: Open)