Using Argument Mining to Assess the Argumentation Quality of Essays

authored by

Henning Wachsmuth, Khalid Al-Khatib, Benno Stein

Abstract

Argument mining aims to determine the argumentative structure of texts. Although it is said to be crucial for future applications such as writing support systems, the benefit of its output has rarely been evaluated. This paper puts the analysis of the output into the focus. In particular, we investigate to what extent the mined structure can be leveraged to assess the argumentation quality of persuasive essays. We find insightful statistical patterns in the structure of essays. From these, we derive novel features that we evaluate in four argumentation-related essay scoring tasks. Our results reveal the benefit of argument mining for assessing argumentation quality. Among others, we improve the state of the art in scoring an essay's organization and its argument strength.

External Organisation(s)

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

1680-1691

No. of pages

12

Publication date

12.2016

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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

Electronic version(s)

https://aclanthology.org/C16-1158 (Access: Open)