MAD: A Corpus of Multilingual Argumentative Deliberation

Eimear Maguire, Ella Schad, Jacky Visser, Chris Reed, John Lawrence


Abstract
We present a corpus of Multilingual Argumentative Deliberation (MAD), a manually annotated corpus of deliberative dialogues in English, German, Polish and Italian. Four groups each completed two variants of a ranking task, the NASA Survival Scenario; once in their native language and once in English. The corpus is annotated using Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT), a framework developed for analysing argument in dialogical settings, and widely used in argument mining. As an argument mining resource, MAD is distinct in offering equivalent instances of spontaneous argumentation across languages. In addition to use in argument mining, the annotation captures both argument relations and dialogue acts, enabling deeper analysis of argument and dialogue structure than typical of argument-only corpora. The design of the corpus enables studies of second-language effects in English-medium interaction, cross-linguistic argument comparisons for German, Polish and Italian, and speaker dialogue strategy consistency, amongst others. The primary annotated MAD corpus is freely available at https://corpora.aifdb.org/mad, while we additionally release the unannotated transcripts to facilitate repurposing of the material.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.554
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6962–6978
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.554/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eimear Maguire, Ella Schad, Jacky Visser, Chris Reed, and John Lawrence. 2026. MAD: A Corpus of Multilingual Argumentative Deliberation. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:6962–6978.
Cite (Informal):
MAD: A Corpus of Multilingual Argumentative Deliberation (Maguire et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.554.pdf