Uncovering Argumentative Flow: A Question-Focus Discourse Structuring Framework

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission7802 Authors

Abstract: Understanding the underlying argumentative flow in analytic argumentative writing is essential for discourse comprehension, especially in complex argumentative discourse such as think-tank commentary. However, existing structure modeling approaches often rely on surface-level topic segmentation, failing to capture the author’s rhetorical intent and reasoning process. To address this limitation, we propose a Question-Focus discourse structuring framework that explicitly models the underlying argumentative flow by anchoring each argumentative unit to a guiding question (reflecting the author’s intent) and a set of attentional foci (highlighting analytical pathways). To assess its effectiveness, we introduce an argument reconstruction task in which the modeled discourse structure guides both evidence retrieval and argument generation. We construct a high-quality dataset comprising 600 authoritative Chinese think-tank articles for experimental analysis. To quantitatively evaluate performance, we propose two novel metrics: (1) Claim Coverage, measuring the proportion of original claims preserved or similarly expressed in reconstructions, and (2) Evidence Coverage, assessing the completeness of retrieved supporting evidences. Experimental results show that our framework uncovers the author’s argumentative logic more effectively and offers better structural guidance for reconstruction, yielding up to a 10\% gain in claim coverage and outperforming strong baselines across both curated and LLM-based metrics.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

Research Area Keywords: argument mining, rhetoric and framing, argument schemes and reasoning

Contribution Types: Data analysis, Theory

Languages Studied: English,Chinese

Submission Number: 7802