A Corpus for Argumentative Writing Support in German

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new annotation scheme and corpus for analyzing argumentative structures in German student persuasive reviews, aiding future development of writing support tools.

Contribution

It presents a novel annotation scheme for claims, premises, and relations in German argumentative texts, along with a corpus of 1,000 peer reviews.

Findings

Moderate inter-rater agreement achieved with the scheme

Annotated corpus enables analysis of argumentative discourse

Guidelines facilitate consistent annotation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel annotation approach to capture claims and premises of arguments and their relations in student-written persuasive peer reviews on business models in German language. We propose an annotation scheme based on annotation guidelines that allows to model claims and premises as well as support and attack relations for capturing the structure of argumentative discourse in student-written peer reviews. We conduct an annotation study with three annotators on 50 persuasive essays to evaluate our annotation scheme. The obtained inter-rater agreement of $\alpha=0.57$ for argument components and $\alpha=0.49$ for argumentative relations indicates that the proposed annotation scheme successfully guides annotators to moderate agreement. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 1,000 persuasive student-written peer reviews on business models and our annotation guidelines to encourage future research on the design and development of argumentative writing support systems for students.