Annotating Argument Schemes

Abstract

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton's taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans' Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure.

Associating Ethos with Objects: Reasoning from Character of Public Figures to Actions in the World

“…This model can contribute in the future to several areas of argumentation study by enabling us to: expand argument schemes typologies such as (Walton et al 2008) and argument schemes keys (a taxonomic key for the identification of argument schemes, see (Visser et al 2020)); create corpora for the new type of ethotic arguments used in natural language (cf. Musi et al 2016; and develop technologies for mining ethotic arguments in order to automatically collect and analyse argumentation schemes used in public debates (cf.…”

Evaluating Reasoning in Natural Arguments: A Procedural Approach

“…3 Using this framework enables a specification of the Reasoning level analysis of CAPNA. At the same time, while the PTA so far has been mainly used as an analytical tool for argument type identification and annotation (Visser et al 2018(Visser et al , 2021Gobbo et al 2019) its use in specifying parts of the comprehensive assessment procedure articulates how it can also be used as an evaluative tool.…”

Classifying Argumentative Relations Using Logical Mechanisms and Argumentation Schemes

“…Some research adopted argumentation schemes as a framework, making comparisons with discourse relations (Cabrio et al, 2013) and collecting and leveraging data at varying degrees of granularity. At a coarse level, prior studies annotated the presence of particular argumentation schemes in text (Visser et al, 2020;Lawrence et al, 2019;Lindahl et al, 2019;Reed et al, 2008) and developed models to classify different schemes (Feng and Hirst, 2011). However, each scheme often accommodates both support and attack relations between statements, so classifying those relations requires semantically richer information within the scheme than just its presence.…”