Is It Worth the Attention? A Comparative Evaluation of Attention Layers for Argument Unit Segmentation
Maximilian Spliethöver, Jonas Klaff, Hendrik Heuer · 2019
Attention mechanisms have seen some success for natural language processing downstream tasks in recent years and generated new stateof-the-art results.A thorough evaluation of the attention mechanism for the task of Argumentation Mining is missing.With this paper, we report a comparative evaluation of attention layers in combination with a bidirectional long short-term memory network, which is the current state-of-the-art approach for the unit segmentation task.We also compare sentencelevel contextualized word embeddings to pregenerated ones.Our findings suggest that for this task, the additional attention layer does not improve the performance.In most cases, contextualized embeddings do also not show an improvement on the score achieved by predefined embeddings.* The first two authors contributed equally.Their listing order is random.