Argument Identification in Chinese Editorials

In this paper, we develop and evaluate several techniques for identifying argumentative paragraphs in Chinese editorials. We first use three methods of evaluation to score a paragraph’s argumentative nature: a relative word frequency approach; a method which targets known argumentative words in our corpus; and a combined approach which uses elements from the previous two. Then, we determine the best score thresholds for separating argumentative and non-argumentative paragraphs. The results of our experimentation show that our relative word frequency approach provides a reliable way to identify argumentative paragraphs with a F1 score of 0.91, though challenges in accurate scoring invite improvement through context-aware means.