Harnessing rhetorical figures for argument mining

Abstract

Abstract. The generalised, automated reconstruction of the reasoning structures underlying persuasive communication is an enormously challenging task. While this work in argument mining is increasingly informed by the rich tradition of argumentation studies outside the computational field, the rhetorical perspective on argumentation is thus far largely ignored. To explore the application of rhetorical insights in argument mining, we conduct a pilot study on the connection between rhetorical figures and argumentation structure. Rhetorical figures are linguistic devices that perform a variety of functions in argumentative discourse. The textual form of some of these figures is easy to identify automatically, such that an established connection between the figure and a preponderance of argumentative content would improve the performance of argument mining techniques. Furthermore, the automated mining of rhetorical figures could be used as an empirical, corpus-based testing ground for the claims made about these figures in the rhetorical literature. In the pilot study, we explore the connection between eight rhetorical figures the forms of which we expect to be relatively easy to identify computationally, and argumentation structure (concretely, we consider the six schemes 'anadiplosis', 'epanaphora', 'epistrophe', 'epizeuxis', 'eutrepismus', and 'polyptoton', and the two tropes 'antithesis' and 'dirimens copulatio', and relate their occurrences to relations of inference and conflict). The data of the study is collected in the MM2012c corpus of 39,694 words of argumentatively annotated transcripts from the BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze discussion program. We show that some of the figures indeed correspond to passages of high argumentative density, relative to the text as a whole.

An annotation scheme for Rhetorical Figures

“…[33]. While Hromada doesn't go there himself, his goal is precisely the objective of the kind of research we have labelled pioneering above and associated with [37]. Seen in this light, Computational Rhetoric takes us back to the root goals of Artificial Intelligence -to replicate human intelligence so that we might understand human intelligence.…”

“…We can see instantly that the reverse repetitions of 26 (along with the medial repetitions, the mesodiplosis, of "who think they are") serve a clear Rhetorical Function -the one we call Comprehensiveness (reinforced in the preceding clause by the phrase "only two kinds of men"), while the repetitions in 27 are looser, almost wholly untethered to each other functionally. We would reserve Dubremetz's term "pioneering" for work that not only searches for Rhetorical Figures but probes their Rhetorical Functions as well, work that has only just begun [37]. Such research turns computational figure detection from a pattern-matching game to a genuine investigation of Natural Language.…”

“…If it doesn't fit, you must acquit. (fit/acquit) [42] The computational detection of figures, including antimetabole, is finding success [2,[12][13][14][15]19,20,33,37,[48][49][50]. Virtually none of this work, however, has gone beyond detection to consider the argumentation context.…”

“…There have been limited successes in figure detection over the past several years [2,[12][13][14][15]19,20,33,37,[48][49][50]. But they have been restricted both in method and in scope, with no concern for figural combinatorics.…”

“…They are clever researchers, so Dubremetz and Nivre manage some interesting results all the same, using a tiny training set, but the lack of training data remains urgent -in particular, for more significant and complex Computational Rhetoric problems than they address, the form/function correlations of Rhetorical Figures Our approach involves a more sophisticated conception of Rhetorical Figures than has been adopted heretofore -in computational approaches, but also in humanistic and social science approaches. Our research operates at layers of formal and functional abstraction that have not been previously explored (though see [37] for promising new advances). It depends fundamentally on an annotation format for Rhetorical Figures, which we report in this paper.…”