Research Advances in Argument Mining

Abstract

[Purpose/Significance] Argument mining, a research hotspot in the field of computational linguistics, provides machine processable structured data for computational models of argument. Argument mining tasks are closely related to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as natural language processing and knowledge representation. There are numerous systematic studies in academia and a clear technical realization route has come into being. New research results continue to emerge as a result of rich resources and rapid development and iteration of deep learning, large language models (LLMs), and other technologies. This study, which reviews the research status and progress of argument mining, can serve as a resource for future research and application development. [Method/Process] Through literature review, this paper systematically reviews the relevant research basis (including foundational techniques and semantic representation models), summarizes the related technical system in terms of task framework, influencing factors of technological complexity, and method classification, and then introduces the argument mining practice and application cases for specific fields and research objectives and makes a comparative analysis. Most importantly, the overall development and characteristics of this research field are summarized, with a focus on tracking the progress of multimedia argument mining in the context of the new AI environment. [Results/Conclusions] Relevant research has experienced the development of "machine learning - deep learning" and "text only - multimodal", and the levels of development and application of various fields vary much. Future research may focus on how to achieve multigranularity and multimodal content generalization, as well as how to promote its application and implementation in practice. Possible research directions include: 1) the use of LLMs in argument mining, because they exhibit significant benefits in downstream applications such as natural language processing and multimodal learning, and can also provide certain technical conditions for the generation of argument content; 2) the use of domain knowledge organization systems such as vocabulary, knowledge base and knowledge graph: with these systems, researchers can combine domain-specific argument mining models with rich knowledge structure, to strengthen semantic representation and organization improve the systematization and dig deeper into argument mining model research in the domain; 3) promoting the application research and practice of argument mining in more fields or across disciplines, and improving the retrieval and visualization of argument information, such as combining information retrieval methods with argument mining to build the next generation of argument search engines.

Keywords

• argument mining|technical system|development path|multimodal