Identifying argument components from unstructured texts and predicting the relationships expressed among them are two primary steps of argument mining. The intrinsic complexity of these tasks demands powerful learning models. While pretrained Transformer-based Language Models (LM) have been shown to provide state-of-the-art results over different NLP tasks, the scarcity of manually annotated data and the highly domain-dependent nature of argumentation restrict the capabilities of such models. In this work, we propose a novel transfer learning strategy to overcome these challenges. We utilize argumentation-rich social discussions from the ChangeMyView subreddit as a source of unsupervised, argumentative discourse-aware knowledge by finetuning pretrained LMs on a selectively masked language modeling task. Furthermore, we introduce a novel prompt-based strategy for inter-component relation prediction that compliments our proposed finetuning method while leveraging on the discourse context. Exhaustive experiments show the generalization capability of our method on these two tasks over within-domain as well as out-of-domain datasets, outperforming several existing and employed strong baselines.

本研究提出了一种基于社交讨论的无监督学习策略，使用已预训练的语言模型，选择性地使用掩码语言模型任务进行微调，并引入了一种基于提示的策略，在将被提取的论点组件之间预测关系时支持上下文语境，此方法表现出了在本领域和跨领域数据集上超越了多个现有的和强基线模型的潜力。

社交讨论中的非监督式知识转移能否帮助论述挖掘？