Topological Ordering for Explicit Global Structural Reasoning in Argument Relation Identification
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Argument relation identification (ARI) aims to recover the directed structure of argumentative discourse, yet most approaches, including recent large language models, treat relations as local decisions and rely on implicit reasoning to enforce global coherence.This often leads to structurally inconsistent argument graphs.We reframe ARI as a global structural reasoning problem and introduce topological ordering as an explicit prediction target.Extensive experiments show consistent improvements in ARI performance, edge-level accuracy, and global structural fidelity across models and learning paradigms.In addition, the predicted topological orders provide faithful, verifiable reasoning traces that are internally consistent with model predictions and aligned with gold argument structure, offering an interpretable alternative to free-form chain-of-thought explanations.1
Authors: Zhiqiang Shi, Oana Cocarascu
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7212412586