This paper presents a proposed method for annotation of scientific arguments in biological/biomedical journal articles. Semantic entities and relations are used to represent the propositional content of arguments in instances of argument schemes. We describe an experiment in which we encoded the arguments in a journal article to identify issues in this approach. Our catalogue of argument schemes and a copy of the annotated article are now publically available.

This paper describes a pilot study to evaluate human analysts’ ability to identify the argumentation scheme and premises of an argument having an implicit conclusion. In preparation for the study, argumentation scheme definitions were crafted for genetics research articles. The schemes were defined in semantic terms, following a proposal to use semantic rules to mine arguments in that literature.