Non-neural approaches to argument mining (AM) are often pipelined and require heavy feature-engineering. In this paper, we propose a neural end-to-end approach to AM which is based on dependency parsing, in contrast to the current state-of-the-art which relies on relation extraction. Our biaffine AM dependency parser significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, performing at F1 = 73.5% for component identification and F1 = 46.4% for relation identification. One of the advantages of treating AM as biaffine dependency parsing is the simple neural architecture that results. The idea of treating AM as dependency parsing is not new, but has previously been abandoned as it was lagging far behind the state-of-the-art. In a thorough analysis, we investigate the factors that contribute to the success of our model: the biaffine model itself, our representation for the dependency structure of arguments, different encoders in the biaffine model, and syntactic information additionally fed to the model. Our work demonstrates that dependency parsing for AM, an overlooked idea from the past, deserves more attention in the future.

Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) remains a challenge despite recent progress in neural-based CWS. The limited amount of annotated data in the target domain has been the key obstacle to a satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised word-based approach to improving cross-domain CWS given a baseline segmenter. Particularly, our model only deploys word embeddings trained on raw text in the target domain, discarding complex hand-crafted features and domain-specific dictionaries. Innovative subsampling and negative sampling methods are proposed to derive word embeddings optimized for CWS. We conduct experiments on five datasets in special domains, covering domains in novels, medicine, and patent. Results show that our model can obviously improve cross-domain CWS, especially in the segmentation of domain-specific noun entities. The word F-measure increases by over 3.0% on four datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised and unsupervised cross-domain CWS approaches with a large margin. We make our data and code available on Github.