Coarse-grained Argumentation Features for Scoring Persuasive Essays

Abstract

Scoring the quality of persuasive essays is an important goal of discourse analysis, addressed most recently with highlevel persuasion-related features such as thesis clarity, or opinions and their targets. We investigate whether argumentation features derived from a coarse-grained argumentative structure of essays can help predict essays scores. We introduce a set of argumentation features related to argument components (e.g., the number of claims and premises), argument relations (e.g., the number of supported claims) and typology of argumentative structure (chains, trees). We show that these features are good predictors of human scores for TOEFL essays, both when the coarsegrained argumentative structure is manually annotated and automatically predicted.