A Corpus of Deep Argumentative Structures as an Explanation to Argumentative Relations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new task for analyzing deep argumentative structures using predefined patterns, demonstrating that most argumentative relations can be explained with high coverage and agreement.

Contribution

It formulates a novel deep argumentative structure analysis task, creates a pattern set for explanation, and validates its effectiveness through detailed annotation and coverage testing.

Findings

74.6% coverage of explanations by pattern set

85.9% inter-annotator agreement

Annotated corpus made publicly available

Abstract

In this paper, we compose a new task for deep argumentative structure analysis that goes beyond shallow discourse structure analysis. The idea is that argumentative relations can reasonably be represented with a small set of predefined patterns. For example, using value judgment and bipolar causality, we can explain a support relation between two argumentative segments as follows: Segment 1 states that something is good, and Segment 2 states that it is good because it promotes something good when it happens. We are motivated by the following questions: (i) how do we formulate the task?, (ii) can a reasonable pattern set be created?, and (iii) do the patterns work? To examine the task feasibility, we conduct a three-stage, detailed annotation study using 357 argumentative relations from the argumentative microtext corpus, a small, but highly reliable corpus. We report the coverage of explanations captured by our patterns on a test set composed of 270 relations. Our coverage result of 74.6% indicates that argumentative relations can reasonably be explained by our small pattern set. Our agreement result of 85.9% shows that a reasonable inter-annotator agreement can be achieved. To assist with future work in computational argumentation, the annotated corpus is made publicly available.