HARGAN: Heterogeneous Argument Attention Network for Persuasiveness Prediction

Argument structure elaborates the relation among claims and premises. Previous works in persuasiveness prediction do not consider this relation in their architectures. To take argument structure information into account, this paper proposes an approach to persuasiveness prediction with a novel graph-based neural network model, called heterogeneous argument attention network (HARGAN). By jointly training on the persuasiveness and stance of the replies, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the ChangeMyView (CMV) dataset for the persuasiveness prediction task. Experimental results show that the graph setting enables our model to aggregate information across multiple paragraphs effectively. In the meanwhile, our stance prediction auxiliary task enables our model to identify the viewpoint of each party, and helps our model perform better on the persuasiveness prediction.