Hierarchical Enhancement Framework for Aspect-based Argument Mining

Abstract

Aspect-Based Argument Mining (ABAM) is a critical task in computational argumentation. Existing methods have primarily treated ABAM as a nested named entity recognition task, overlooking the need for tailored strategies to effectively address the specific challenges of ABAM tasks. To this end, we propose a layer-based Hierarchical Enhancement Framework (HEF) for ABAM, and introduce three novel components: the Semantic and Syntactic Fusion (SSF) component, the Batchlevel Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (BHGAT) component, and the Span Mask Interactive Attention (SMIA) component. These components serve the purposes of optimizing underlying representations, detecting argument unit stances, and constraining aspect term recognition boundaries, respectively. By incorporating these components, our framework enables better handling of the challenges and improves the performance and accuracy in argument unit and aspect term recognition. Experiments on multiple datasets and various tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework and components. 1