Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021;35(1):101-139.
doi: 10.1007/s10503-020-09519-x. Epub 2020 May 7.

Annotating Argument Schemes

Jacky Visser  1 , John Lawrence  1 , Chris Reed  1 , Jean Wagemans  2 , Douglas Walton  3
Affiliations

Annotating Argument Schemes

Jacky Visser et al. Argumentation. 2021.

Abstract

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton's taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans' Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure.

Keywords: Annotation; Argument Type Identification Procedure (ATIP); Argument scheme; Argument scheme key (ASK); Argumentation scheme; Corpus; Election debates; Periodic table of arguments.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Diagrammatic visualisation of Example (2) in the IAT-annotated US2016G1tv corpus
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Fragment of the decision tree heuristic for distinguishing between action-oriented argument schemes in Walton’s taxonomy
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Diagrammatic visualisation of the annotation of Example (2) as an instance of practical reasoning from analogy in the US2016G1tvWALTON corpus
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Decision tree for determining argument form in the Argument Type Identification Procedure (ATIP)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Al Khatib, K., H. Wachsmuth, J. Kiesel, M. Hagen, and B. Stein. 2016. A news editorial corpus for mining argumentation strategies. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, 3433–3443. Osaka: The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
    1. Anthony R, Kim M. Challenges and remedies for identifying and classifying argumentation schemes. Argumentation. 2015;29(1):81–113. doi: 10.1007/s10503-014-9335-1. - DOI
    1. Atkinson K, Bench-Capon T. Taking account of the actions of others in value-based reasoning. Artificial Intelligence. 2018;254:1–20. doi: 10.1016/j.artint.2017.09.002. - DOI
    1. Austin JL. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1962.
    1. Baroni P, Gabbay D, Giacomin M, Van der Torre L. Handbook of Formal Argumentation. London: College Publications; 2018.

LinkOut - more resources