TILFA: A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Mining

Qing Zong, Zhaowei Wang, Baixuan Xu, Tianshi Zheng, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Y. Wong, Simon See

Abstract: A main goal of Argument Mining (AM) is to analyze an author's stance. Unlike previous AM datasets focusing only on text, the shared task at the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining introduces a dataset including both text and images. Importantly, these images contain both visual elements and optical characters. Our new framework, TILFA (A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Mining), is designed to handle this mixed data. It excels at not only understanding text but also detecting optical characters and recognizing layout details in images. Our model significantly outperforms existing baselines, earning our team, KnowComp, the 1st place in the leaderboard of Argumentative Stance Classification subtask in this shared task.