AEG: Argumentative Essay Generation via A Dual-Decoder Model with Content Planning

Abstract

Argument generation is an important but challenging task in computational argumentation. Existing studies have mainly focused on generating individual short arguments, while research on generating long and coherent argumentative essays is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a new task, Argumentative Essay Generation (AEG). Given a writing prompt, the goal of AEG is to automatically generate an argumentative essay with strong persuasiveness. We construct a large-scale dataset, ArgEssay, for this new task and establish a strong model based on a dual-decoder Transformer architecture. Our proposed model contains two decoders, a planning decoder (PD) and a writing decoder (WD), where PD is used to generate a sequence for essay content planning and WD incorporates the planning information to write an essay. Further, we pre-train this model on a large news dataset to enhance the plan-and-write paradigm. Automatic and human evaluation results show that our model can generate more coherent and persuasive essays with higher diversity and less repetition compared to several baselines.