Recognizing the Absence of Opposing Arguments in Persuasive Essays

摘要

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.