Full-Text Argumentation Mining on Scientific Publications

Scholarly Argumentation Mining (SAM) has recently gained attention due to its potential to help scholars with the rapid growth of published scientific literature. It comprises two subtasks: argumentative discourse unit recognition (ADUR) and argumentative relation extraction (ARE), both of which are challenging since they require e.g. the integration of domain knowledge, the detection of implicit statements, and the disambiguation of argument structure. While previous work focused on dataset construction and baseline methods for specific document sections, such as abstract or results, full-text scholarly argumentation mining has seen little progress. In this work, we introduce a sequential pipeline model combining ADUR and ARE for full-text SAM, and provide a first analysis of the performance of pretrained language models (PLMs) on both subtasks. We establish a new SotA for ADUR on the Sci-Arg corpus, outperforming the previous best reported result by a large margin (+7% F1). We also present the first results for ARE, and thus for the full AM pipeline, on this benchmark dataset. Our detailed error analysis reveals that non-contiguous ADUs as well as the interpretation of discourse connectors pose major challenges and that data annotation needs to be more consistent.

A Comparative Study of Pre-trained Encoders for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition

Pre-trained language models (PLM) are effective components of few-shot named entity recognition (NER) approaches when augmented with continued pre-training on task-specific out-of-domain data or fine-tuning on in-domain data. However, their performance in low-resource scenarios, where such data is not available, remains an open question. We introduce an encoder evaluation framework, and use it to systematically compare the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained representations on the task of low-resource NER. We analyze a wide range of encoders pre-trained with different strategies, model architectures, intermediate-task fine-tuning, and contrastive learning. Our experimental results across ten benchmark NER datasets in English and German show that encoder performance varies significantly, suggesting that the choice of encoder for a specific low-resource scenario needs to be carefully evaluated.