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We present a computational exploration of argument critique writing by young students. Middle school students were asked to criticize an argument presented in the prompt, focusing on identifying and explaining the reasoning flaws. This task resembles an established college-level argument critique task. Lexical and discourse features that utilize detailed domain knowledge to identify critiques exist for the college task but do not perform well on the young students data. Instead, transformer-based architecture (e.g., BERT) fine-tuned on a large corpus of critique essays from the college task performs much better (over 20% improvement in F1 score). Analysis of the performance of various configurations of the system suggests that while childrens writing does not exhibit the standard discourse structure of an argumentative essay, it does share basic local sequential structures with the more mature writers.
In this paper, we compose a new task for deep argumentative structure analysis that goes beyond shallow discourse structure analysis. The idea is that argumentative relations can reasonably be represented with a small set of predefined patterns. For example, using value judgment and bipolar causality, we can explain a support relation between two argumentative segments as follows: Segment 1 states that something is good, and Segment 2 states that it is good because it promotes something good when it happens. We are motivated by the following questions: (i) how do we formulate the task?, (ii) can a reasonable pattern set be created?, and (iii) do the patterns work? To examine the task feasibility, we conduct a three-stage, detailed annotation study using 357 argumentative relations from the argumentative microtext corpus, a small, but highly reliable corpus. We report the coverage of explanations captured by our patterns on a test set composed of 270 relations. Our coverage result of 74.6% indicates that argumentative relations can reasonably be explained by our small pattern set. Our agreement result of 85.9% shows that a reasonable inter-annotator agreement can be achieved. To assist with future work in computational argumentation, the annotated corpus is made publicly available.
When engaging in argumentative discourse, skilled human debaters tailor claims to the beliefs of the audience, to construct effective arguments. Recently, the field of computational argumentation witnessed extensive effort to address the automatic generation of arguments. However, existing approaches do not perform any audience-specific adaptation. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by studying the task of belief-based claim generation: Given a controversial topic and a set of beliefs, generate an argumentative claim tailored to the beliefs. To tackle this task, we model the peoples prior beliefs through their stances on controversial topics and extend state-of-the-art text generation models to generate claims conditioned on the beliefs. Our automatic evaluation confirms the ability of our approach to adapt claims to a set of given beliefs. In a manual study, we additionally evaluate the generated claims in terms of informativeness and their likelihood to be uttered by someone with a respective belief. Our results reveal the limitations of modeling users beliefs based on their stances, but demonstrate the potential of encoding beliefs into argumentative texts, laying the ground for future exploration of audience reach.
Medical report generation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis. Although existing approaches have achieved promising results, they either require a predefined template database in order to retrieve sentences or ignore the hierarchical nature of medical report generation. To address these issues, we propose MedWriter that incorporates a novel hierarchical retrieval mechanism to automatically extract both report and sentence-level templates for clinically accurate report generation. MedWriter first employs the Visual-Language Retrieval~(VLR) module to retrieve the most relevant reports for the given images. To guarantee the logical coherence between sentences, the Language-Language Retrieval~(LLR) module is introduced to retrieve relevant sentences based on the previous generated description. At last, a language decoder fuses image features and features from retrieved reports and sentences to generate meaningful medical reports. We verified the effectiveness of our model by automatic evaluation and human evaluation on two datasets, i.e., Open-I and MIMIC-CXR.
Pruning is an effective method to reduce the memory footprint and computational cost associated with large natural language processing models. However, current approaches either only explore head pruning, which has a limited pruning ratio, or only focus on unstructured pruning, which has negligible effects on the real inference time and/or power consumption. To address these challenges, we develop a novel MultiLevel structured Pruning (MLPruning) framework, which uses three different levels of structured pruning: head pruning, row pruning, and block-wise sparse pruning. We propose using a learnable Top-k threshold, which employs an adaptive regularization to adjust the regularization magnitude adaptively, to select appropriate pruning ratios for different weight matrices. We also propose a two-step pipeline to combine block-wise pruning with head/row pruning to achieve high structured pruning ratios with minimum accuracy degradation. Our empirical results show that for bertbase, with textapprox20% of remaining weights, OURS can achieve an accuracy that is comparable to the full model on QQP/MNLI/squad, with up to textapprox3.69x speedup. Our framework has been open sourced~cite{codebase}.
Non-autoregressive models are promising on various text generation tasks. Previous work hardly considers to explicitly model the positions of generated words. However, position modeling is an essential problem in non-autoregressive text generation. In this study, we propose PNAT, which incorporates positions as a latent variable into the text generative process. Experimental results show that PNAT achieves top results on machine translation and paraphrase generation tasks, outperforming several strong baselines.