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. 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. The Argument Mining workshop series is the main research forum for argument mining related research.

Applications

Argument mining has been applied in many different genres including the qualitative assessment of social media content, where it provides a powerful tool for policy-makers and researchers in social and political sciences. Other domains include legal documents, product reviews, scientific articles, online debates, newspaper articles and dialogical domains.

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. 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.