A News Editorial Corpus for Mining Argumentation Strategies

authored by

Khalid Al-Khatib, Henning Wachsmuth, Johannes Kiesel, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein

Abstract

Many argumentative texts, and news editorials in particular, follow a specific strategy to persuade their readers of some opinion or attitude. This includes decisions such as when to tell an anecdote or where to support an assumption with statistics, which is reflected by the composition of different types of argumentative discourse units in a text. While several argument mining corpora have recently been published, they do not allow the study of argumentation strategies due to incomplete or coarse-grained unit annotations. This paper presents a novel corpus with 300 editorials from three diverse news portals that provides the basis for mining argumentation strategies. Each unit in all editorials has been assigned one of six types by three annotators with a high Fleiss' K agreement of 0.56. We investigate various challenges of the annotation process and we conduct a first corpus analysis. Our results reveal different strategies across the news portals, exemplifying the benefit of studying editorials-a so far underresourced text genre in argument mining.

External Organisation(s)

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

3433-3443

No. of pages

11

Publication date

12.2016

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computational Theory and Mathematics, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language

Electronic version(s)

https://aclanthology.org/C16-1324/ (Access: Open)