Argument Mining

Preface

This book is an introduction to the theoretical and linguistic concepts of argumentation and their application to argumentation mining. It partly emerged from a course given at the ESSLLI summer school held in Toulouse in July 2017. Argumentation mining is now an important research and development activity. It can be viewed as a highly complex form of information retrieval. Argument mining addresses compelling application needs like those posed by complex information seeking like reasoning for or against a controversial statement, e-debate or getting to know the different aspects of a complex issue.

Argument mining has its roots in information retrieval and question answering, with a higher theoretical and practical complexity. In particular, arguments are complex natural language constructs, with several relational aspects and implicit elements, such as the premise–conclusion–warrant triad. Therefore, it is not surprising that argument mining requires high-level natural language processing technology. Argument mining requires either complex machine learning algorithms or lexical and grammatical systems, which can deal with the complexity of arguments considered in isolation and in a context with other arguments. The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to the main linguistic and language processing concepts.

Understanding how argumentation is realized conceptually and in language usually implies manually annotating argumentation components in various types ...