Friend to Develop an Argumentative Essay

Writing is a process that helps the students develop their ideas and logical thinking. Principally, to write means to try to produce a written message. Because of these facts, it is necessary for teachers and students to master it well as writing plays a very important role in many processes including teaching and learning proc-esses. However, in the real teaching and learning process, junior high students who have been accustomed to LKS (Student Worksheet) consider writing a boring activity. They have to just fill in the blanks, answer the ques-tions, and rearrange jumbled paragraphs in spite of writing their own ideas based on certain topics. This be-comes the drawbacks for them to get actively involved in writing activities. To overcome that, FRIEND standing for Fact, Reason, Point, Elaboration and Decision is considered help-ful to improve learners' ability to develop an argumentative essay. FRIEND helps learners to write well-developed and properly organized essay since it provides systematic ways to do so. Besides, FRIEND actually gives learners an easy way to think, express, and organize their ideas into a good argumentative essay. . Keywords: FRIEND, argumentative essa

Argument Mining with Structured SVMs and RNNs

We propose a novel factor graph model for argument mining, designed for settings in which the argumentative relations in a document do not necessarily form a tree structure. (This is the case in over 20% of the web comments dataset we release.) Our model jointly learns elementary unit type classification and argumentative relation prediction. Moreover, our model supports SVM and RNN parametrizations, can enforce structure constraints (e.g., transitivity), and can express dependencies between adjacent relations and propositions. Our approaches outperform unstructured baselines in both web comments and argumentative essay datasets.Comment: Accepted for publication at ACL 2017. 11 pages, 5 figures. Code at https://github.com/vene/marseille and data at http://joonsuk.org

For (Some) Immigration Restrictions

According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move around the globe and settle as they wish, with exceptions made only in very specific cases such as fugitives or terrorists. Defenders of open borders have adopted two major argumentative strategies. The first is to claim that immigration restrictions involve coercion, and then show that such coercion cannot be morally justified. The second is to argue that adopting worldwide open borders policies would make the world a much better place, particularly by improving average well-being. This essay contends that both of these argumentative strategies fail. Some immigration restrictions are not only morally justified, but morally required

Parsing Argumentation Structures in Persuasive Essays

In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures. The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations using integer linear programming. We show that our model considerably improves the performance of base classifiers and significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines. Moreover, we introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement. This corpus and the annotation guidelines are freely available for ensuring reproducibility and to encourage future research in computational argumentation.Comment: Under review in Computational Linguistics. First submission: 26 October 2015. Revised submission: 15 July 201

Self-reported problems of L1 and L2 college writers: what can writing instructors do?

Understanding self-reported problems of L1 and L2 writers regarding the writing process holds important pedagogical implications for instructors to address their students’ specific writing needs. L2 writers were usually reported to have more difficulty setting goals and generating material, and to produce less accurate and effective texts (Leki, 1992; Silva 1993, 1997). This paper compares the self-reported writing difficulties of two groups: L1 (N=19) and L2 (N=19) freshman composition students from an American university. To analyze the group differences, a questionnaire (using 5-point Likert scale) about the perceptions of writing difficulties and approaches to writing process was used. Findings from the descriptive statistical analysis suggest that despite self-reported common problems, such as keeping clarity by using appropriate syntax, the L1 and L2 students presented different views on the importance of visuals in a text. While L1s find visuals to be least important for the reader to understand the text, L2s find visuals to be most important. The results reveal that although instructors focus on teaching essay organization, both L1 and L2 students need more instruction on creating better sentence structures. Encouraging L2 students to use visuals (pictures and graphs) in their persuasive essays would prove beneficial for them to overcome writing problems in English

Neural End-to-End Learning for Computational Argumentation Mining

We investigate neural techniques for end-to-end computational argumentation mining (AM). We frame AM both as a token-based dependency parsing and as a token-based sequence tagging problem, including a multi-task learning setup. Contrary to models that operate on the argument component level, we find that framing AM as dependency parsing leads to subpar performance results. In contrast, less complex (local) tagging models based on BiLSTMs perform robustly across classification scenarios, being able to catch long-range dependencies inherent to the AM problem. Moreover, we find that jointly learning 'natural' subtasks, in a multi-task learning setup, improves performance.Comment: To be published at ACL 201

THE USE OF COHESIVE DEVICES IN RELATION TO THE QUALITY OF THE STUDENTS’ ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

The ability to compose an argumentative text is important for ESL and EFL learners. In terms of the communicative nature of writing, cohesion is regarded as an essential textual component, not only to create organized text but also to the comprehensiveness of the text. Therefore, the use of cohesive devices is really important. Based on Halliday and Hasan Cohesion theory (1976)this study is intended to investigate the use of cohesive devices and also the relationship between the frequency of cohesive devices using and the quality of argumentative writing. An analysis of 30 students’ argumentative writing showed that the students were familiar with various cohesive devices and used them in their writing. Among the cohesive devices, reference had the largest percentage of the total number cohesive devices, followed by lexical devices and conjunction devices. Furthermore, it was found that there was no significant relationship between the number of cohesive devi ces used and the quality of writing. The findings of the study have some important implications for EFL writing teachers and learners

A case study of argumentation at undergraduate level in history

This article examines two essays by undergraduate students in the first year of study in History at a university in the UK. It also draws on documentary evidence from the department in question and interviews with the students themselves to paint a picture of the way argumentation operates at this level. While no firm conclusions can be drawn, the evidence suggests a department with a high degree of awareness of the importance of argument and argumentation in studying History; and students who are aware and articulate about the problem facing them in constructing essays in the discipline. Suggestions are made about induction into the epistemological and argumentative demands of undergraduate study