Lecture: 'Argument Mining and Argument Analytics'

Argumentation has been attracting a lot of attention since the very beginning of the scientific reflection. The Centre for Argument Technology has been developing the infrastructure for studying argument structures for almost two decades, demonstrating several characteristics.

First, building upon the graph-based standard for argument representation, Argument Interchange Format AIF (Rahwan et al., 2007); and Inference Anchoring Theory IAT (Budzynska and Reed, 2011) which allows to capture dialogic context of argumentation.

Second, focusing on a variety of aspects of argument structures such as argumentation schemes (Lawrence and Reed, 2016); rephrase relation which paraphrases parts of argument structures (Konat et al., 2016); illocutionary intentions speakers associate with arguments (Budzynska et al., 2014a); protocols of argumentative dialogue games (Yaskorska and Janier 2015; Yaskorska 2016); reported speech; and ethos of arguments' authors (Duthie et al., 2016).

Our AIF corpora of annotated argument structures represent various domains and genres (OVA+ annotation tool available at ova.arg-tech.org) including moral radio debates (Budzynska et al., 2014b); Hansard records of the UK parliamentary debates (Duthie et al., 2016); e-participation (Konat et al., 2016; Lawrence et al., forthcoming); and the US 2016 presidential debates (Visser et al., forthcoming).

In this talk, researchers will show how such complex argument structures, which on the one hand make the annotation process more time-consuming and less reliable, can on the other hand result in automatic extraction of a variety of valuable information when applying technologies for argument mining (Budzynska and Villata, 2017; Lawrence and Reed, forthcoming) and argument analytics (Lawrence et al. 2017).