Towards Full-Text Scholarly Argument Mining using Entity-Anchored Claim Extraction
Bhuvanesh Verma, Andy Lüking, Mounika Marreddy, Leon Lukas Hammerla, Alexander Mehler
Abstract
Argument mining in full-text scholarly articles remains an important yet challenging task. This difficulty stems not only from the need to model long-distance dependencies but also from the substantial effort required to annotate sentence-level argumentative components throughout lengthy documents. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach that leverages scientific entity mentions (e.g., tasks, datasets, and models) to identify and structure claims in scholarly literature. We validate our approach through a case study involving 50 full-text research papers on sentiment analysis. We first establish a reliable human gold standard (Krippendorff's $α= 0.80$), identifying 113 claim-bearing sentences and extracting 199 structured claim records from 300 candidate sentences. To address the annotation bottleneck, we employ a majority-voting ensemble of large language models (LLMs) to generate a silver-standard dataset comprising 1,487 claims. Encoders fine-tuned exclusively on the silver-standard dataset outperform those trained on a small human-annotated gold-standard dataset and demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer to NLP papers outside the training corpus.