Decomposing Argumentative Essay Generation via Dialectical Planning of Complex Reasoning

Yuhang He, Jianzhu Bao, Yang Sun, Bin Liang, Min Yang, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu

Abstract: Argumentative Essay Generation (AEG) is a challenging task in computational argumentation, where detailed logical reasoning and effective rhetorical skills are essential.Previous methods on argument generation typically involve planning prior to generation.However, the planning strategies in these methods overlook the exploration of the logical reasoning process.Inspired by argument structure-related theories, we propose an argumentative planning strategy for prompting large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality essays.This strategy comprises two stages: (1) Sketch planning, which creates a rough outline of the essay, and (2) Dialectical planning, which refines the outline through critical self-reflection.Such a planning strategy enables LLMs to write argumentative essays that are more logical, diverse, and persuasive.Furthermore, due to the scarcity of existing AEG datasets, we construct three new datasets.These datasets are from two domains: exam essays and news editorials, covering both Chinese and English.Automatic and manual evaluation on four datasets show that our method can generate more dialectical and persuasive essays with higher diversity compared to several strong baselines.