Improved argumentative paragraphs detection in academic theses supported with unit segmentation

Academic theses writing is a complex task that requires the author to be skilled in argumentation. The goal of the academic author is to communicate clear ideas and to convince the reader of the presented claims. However, few students are good arguers, and this is a skill that takes time to master. In this paper, we present an exploration of lexical features used to model automatic detection of argumentative paragraphs using machine learning techniques. We present a novel proposal, which combines the information in the complete paragraph with the detection of argumentative segments in order to achieve improved results for the detection of argumentative paragraphs. We propose two approaches; a more descriptive one, which uses the decision tree classifier with indicators and lexical features; and another more efficient, which uses an SVM classifier with lexical features and a Document Occurrence Representation (DOR). Both approaches consider the detection of argumentative segments to ensure that a paragraph detected as argumentative has indeed segments with argumentation. We achieved encouraging results for both approaches.