Fusion weighted features and BiLSTM-attention model for argument mining of EFL writing

Argument mining (AM), an emerging field in natural language processing (NLP), aims to automatically extract arguments and the relationships between them in texts. In this study, we propose a new method for argument mining of argumentative essays. The method generates dynamic word vectors with BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), encodes argumentative essays, and obtains word-level and essay-level features with BiLSTM (Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory) and attention training, respectively. By integrating these two levels of features we obtain the full-text features so that the content in the essay is annotated according to Toulmin’s argument model. The proposed method was tested on a corpus of 180 argumentative essays, and the precision of automatic annotation reached 69%. The experimental results show that our model outperforms existing models in argument mining. The model can provide technical support for the automatic scoring system, particularly on the evaluation of the content of argumentative essays.