@inproceedings{sun-etal-2023-probing,
    title = "Probing Graph Decomposition for Argument Pair Extraction",
    author = "Sun, Yang  and
      Liang, Bin  and
      Bao, Jianzhu  and
      Zhang, Yice  and
      Tu, Geng  and
      Yang, Min  and
      Xu, Ruifeng",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.827",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.827",
    pages = "13075--13088",
    abstract = "Argument pair extraction (APE) aims to extract interactive argument pairs from two passages within a discussion. The key challenge of APE is to effectively capture the complex context-aware interactive relations of arguments between the two passages. In this paper, we elicit relational semantic knowledge from large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a probing technique. The induced sentence-level relational probing graph can help capture rich explicit interactive relations between argument pairs effectively. Since the relevance score of a sentence pair within a passage is generally larger than that of the sentence pair from different passages, each sentence would prefer to propagate information within the same passage and under-explore the interactive relations between two passages. To tackle this issue, we propose a graph decomposition method to decompose the probing graph into four sub-graphs from intra- and inter-passage perspectives, where the intra-passage graphs can help detect argument spans within each passage and the inter-passage graphs can help identify the argument pairs between the review and rebuttal passages. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our method achieves substantial improvements over strong baselines for APE.",
}

Argument pair extraction (APE) aims to extract interactive argument pairs from two passages within a discussion. The key challenge of APE is to effectively capture the complex context-aware interactive relations of arguments between the two passages. In this paper, we elicit relational semantic knowledge from large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a probing technique. The induced sentence-level relational probing graph can help capture rich explicit interactive relations between argument pairs effectively. Since the relevance score of a sentence pair within a passage is generally larger than that of the sentence pair from different passages, each sentence would prefer to propagate information within the same passage and under-explore the interactive relations between two passages. To tackle this issue, we propose a graph decomposition method to decompose the probing graph into four sub-graphs from intra- and inter-passage perspectives, where the intra-passage graphs can help detect argument spans within each passage and the inter-passage graphs can help identify the argument pairs between the review and rebuttal passages. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our method achieves substantial improvements over strong baselines for APE.
Sun, Yang Liang, Bin Bao, Jianzhu Zhang, Yice Tu, Geng Yang, Min Xu, Ruifeng
Probing Graph Decomposition for Argument Pair Extraction