Unlocking Transfer Learning in Argumentation Mining: A Domain-Independent Modelling Approach

Argument identification is the fundamental block of every Argumentation Mining pipeline, which in turn is a young upcoming field with multiple applications ranging from strategy support to opinion mining and news fact-checking. We developed a model, which is tackling the two biggest practical and academic challenges of the research field today. First, it addresses the lack of corpus-agnostic models and, second, it tackles the problem of human-labor-intensive NLP models being costly to develop. We do that by suggesting and implementing an easy-to-use solution that utilizes the latest advancements in natural language Transfer Learning. The result is a two-fold contribution: A system that delivers state-of-the-art results in multiple corpora and opens up a new way of academic advancement of the field through Transfer Learning. Additionally, it provides the architecture for an easy-to-use tool that can be used for practical applications without the need for domain-specific knowledge.