Recognizing the Absence of Opposing Arguments in Persuasive Essays

Christian Stab, Iryna Gurevych

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an approach for recognizing the absence of opposing arguments in persuasive essays. We model this task as a binary document classification and show that adversative transitions in combination with unigrams and syntactic production rules significantly outperform a challenging heuristic baseline. Our approach yields an accuracy of 75.6% and 84% of human performance in a persuasive essay corpus with various topics.