†Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-TUDA)

www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de In this paper, we present a novel ap-proach for identifying argumentative dis-course structures in persuasive essays. The structure of argumentation consists of sev-eral components (i.e. claims and premises) that are connected with argumentative re-lations. We consider this task in two consecutive steps. First, we identify the components of arguments using multiclass classification. Second, we classify a pair of argument components as either support or non-support for identifying the struc-ture of argumentative discourse. For both tasks, we evaluate several classifiers and propose novel feature sets including struc-tural, lexical, syntactic and contextual fea-tures. In our experiments, we obtain a macro F1-score of 0.726 for identifying argument components and 0.722 for argu-mentative relations.