Abstract:
The evaluation of argumentation quality aims to automatically evaluate the overall quality of an argumentative process. This paper investigates the discourse-level argumentation in Chinese student essays, in which there is a thesis sentence and a discourse supporting the claim described as evidence. This paper introduces the first annotated dataset for Chinese discourse-level argumentation quality evaluation, derived from authentic student essays. Furthermore, a model is proposed for evaluating the argumentation quality based on both semantic and structural encoding. This model employs a language model as the text encoder to extract semantic information, while for the structural features, a graph embedding algorithm based on Abstract Meaning Representation is utilized. Next, a fusion function facilitates evaluation of argumentation quality. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods.