AMERICANO: Argument Generation with Discourse-driven Decomposition and Agent Interaction

TL;DR

Americano is a novel argument generation framework that decomposes the process into sequential steps based on argumentation theory, incorporates agent interaction and refinement, and outperforms existing methods in producing coherent, persuasive arguments.

Contribution

Introduces Americano, a discourse-driven, agent-interaction framework for argument generation that enhances coherence and persuasiveness over prior end-to-end and chain-of-thought methods.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in counterargument generation

Produces more coherent and persuasive arguments

Generates diverse and rich content

Abstract

Argument generation is a challenging task in natural language processing, which requires rigorous reasoning and proper content organization. Inspired by recent chain-of-thought prompting that breaks down a complex task into intermediate steps, we propose Americano, a novel framework with agent interaction for argument generation. Our approach decomposes the generation process into sequential actions grounded on argumentation theory, which first executes actions sequentially to generate argumentative discourse components, and then produces a final argument conditioned on the components. To further mimic the human writing process and improve the left-to-right generation paradigm of current autoregressive language models, we introduce an argument refinement module which automatically evaluates and refines argument drafts based on feedback received. We evaluate our framework on the task of counterargument generation using a subset of Reddit/CMV dataset. The results show that our method outperforms both end-to-end and chain-of-thought prompting methods and can generate more coherent and persuasive arguments with diverse and rich contents.