Segmentation of Argumentative Texts by Key Statements for Argument Mining from the Web

Argument mining is the task of identifying the argument structure of a text: claims, premises, support/attack relations, etc.However, determining the complete argument structure can be quite involved, especially for unpolished texts from online forums, while for many applications the identification of argumentative key statements would suffice (e.g., for argument search).To this end, we introduce and investigate the new task of segmenting an argumentative text by its key statements.We formalize the task, create a first dataset from online communities, propose an evaluation scheme, and conduct a pilot study with several approaches.Interestingly, our experimental results indicate that none of the tested approaches (even LLMbased ones) can actually satisfactorily solve key statement segmentation yet.