Argument mining

Argument mining, or argumentation mining, is a research area within the natural-language processing field. The goal of argument mining is the automatic extraction and identification of argumentative structures from natural language text with the aid of computer programs.^[1] Such argumentative structures include the premise, conclusions, the argument scheme and the relationship between the main and subsidiary argument, or the main and counter-argument within discourse.^[2][3] The Argument Mining workshop series is the main research forum for argument mining related research.^[4]

Applications

Argument mining has been applied in many different genres including the qualitative assessment of social media content (e.g. Twitter, Facebook), where it provides a powerful tool for policy-makers and researchers in social and political sciences.^[1] Other domains include legal documents, product reviews, scientific articles, online debates, newspaper articles and dialogical domains. Transfer learning approaches have been successfully used to combine the different domains into a domain agnostic argumentation model.^[5]

Argument mining has been used to provide students individual writing support by accessing and visualizing the argumentation discourse in their texts. The application of argument mining in a user-centered learning tool helped students to improve their argumentation skills significantly compared to traditional argumentation learning applications.^[6]

Challenges

Given the wide variety of text genres and the different research perspectives and approaches, it has been difficult to reach a common and objective evaluation scheme.^[7] Many annotated data sets have been proposed, with some gaining popularity, but a consensual data set is yet to be found. Annotating argumentative structures is a highly demanding task. There have been successful attempts to delegate such annotation tasks to the crowd but the process still requires a lot of effort and carries significant cost. Initial attempts to bypass this hurdle were made using the weak supervision approach.^[8]

See also

• Argument technology – Sub-field of artificial intelligence
• Argumentation theory – Academic field of logic and rhetoric
• Logic translation – Translation of a text into a logical system