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AEG: Argumentative Essay Generation via A Dual-Decoder Model with Content Planning

  • Jianzhu Bao
  • , Yasheng Wang
  • , Yitong Li
  • , Fei Mi
  • , Ruifeng Xu*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen
  • Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies
  • Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
  • Peng Cheng Laboratory

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Argument generation is an important but challenging task in computational argumentation. Existing studies have mainly focused on generating individual short arguments, while research on generating long and coherent argumentative essays is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a new task, Argumentative Essay Generation (AEG). Given a writing prompt, the goal of AEG is to automatically generate an argumentative essay with strong persuasiveness. We construct a large-scale dataset, ArgEssay, for this new task and establish a strong model based on a dual-decoder Transformer architecture. Our proposed model contains two decoders, a planning decoder (PD) and a writing decoder (WD), where PD is used to generate a sequence for essay content planning and WD incorporates the planning information to write an essay. Further, we pre-train this model on a large news dataset to enhance the plan-and-write paradigm. Automatic and human evaluation results show that our model can generate more coherent and persuasive essays with higher diversity and less repetition compared to several baselines.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
EditorsYoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages5134-5148
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429401
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022 - Hybrid, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Duration: 7 Dec 202211 Dec 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022

Conference

Conference2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityHybrid, Abu Dhabi
Period7/12/2211/12/22

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