UniASA: A Unified Generative Framework for Argument Structure Analysis

Argumentation is a fundamental human activity that involves reasoning and persuasion, which also serves as the basis for the development of AI systems capable of complex reasoning. In NLP, to better understand human argumentation, argument structure analysis aims to identify argument components, such as claims and premises, and their relations from free text. It encompasses a variety of divergent tasks, such as end-to-end argument mining, argument pair extraction, and argument quadruplet extraction. Existing methods are usually tailored to only one specific argument structure analysis task, overlooking the inherent connections among different tasks. We observe that the fundamental goal of these tasks is similar: identifying argument components and their interrelations. Motivated by this, we present a unified generative framework for argument structure analysis (UniASA). It can uniformly address multiple argument structure analysis tasks in a sequence-to-sequence manner. Further, we enhance UniASA with a multi-view learning strategy based on subtask decomposition. We conduct experiments on seven datasets across three tasks. The results indicate that UniASA can address these tasks uniformly and achieve performance that is either superior to or comparable with the previous state-of-the-art methods. Also, we show that UniASA can be effectively integrated with large language models, such as Llama, through fine-tuning or in-context learning.