In this paper we present US2016, the largest publicly available set of corpora of annotated dialogical argumentation. The annotation covers argumentative relations, dialogue acts and pragmatic features. The corpora comprise transcriptions of television debates leading up to the 2016 US presidential elections, and reactions to the debates on Reddit. These two constitutive parts of the corpora are integrated by means of the intertextual correspondence between them. The rhetorical richness and high argument density of the communicative context results in cross-genre corpora that are robust resources for the study of the dialogical dynamics of argumentation in three ways: first, in empirical strands of research in discourse analysis and argumentation studies; second, in the burgeoning field of argument mining where automatic techniques require such data; and third, in formulating algorithmic techniques for sensemaking through the development of Argument Analytics.
Automatically recognising and extracting the reasoning expressed in natural language text is extremely demanding and only very recently has there been significant headway. While such argument mining focuses on logos (the content of what is said) evidence has demonstrated that using ethos (the character of the speaker) can sometimes be an even more powerful tool of influence. We study the UK parliamentary debates which furnish a rich source of ethos with linguistic material signalling the ethotic relationships between politicians. We then develop a novel deep modular recurrent neural network, DMRNN, approach and employ proven methods from argument mining and sentiment analysis to create an ethos mining pipeline. Annotation of ethotic statements is reliable and its extraction is robust (macro-F1 = 0.83), while annotation of polarity is perfect and its extraction is solid (macro-F1 = 0.84). By exploring correspondences between ethos in political discourse and major events in the political landscape through ethos analytics, we uncover tantalising evidence that identifying expressions of positive and negative ethotic sentiment is a powerful instrument for understanding the dynamics of governments.
The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory.
Argument mining integrates many distinct computational linguistics tasks, and as a result, reporting agreement between annotators or between automated output and gold standard is particularly challenging. More worrying for the field, agreement and performance are also reported in a wide variety of different ways, making comparison between approaches difficult. To solve this problem, we propose the CASS technique for combining metrics covering different parts of the argument mining task. CASS delivers a justified method of integrating results yielding confusion matrices from which CASS-κ and CASS-F1 scores can be calculated.
In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.
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