A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate

Marilyn Walker, Jean Fox Tree, Pranav Anand, Rob Abbott, Joseph King

Abstract
Deliberative, argumentative discourse is an important component of opinion formation, belief revision, and knowledge discovery; it is a cornerstone of modern civil society. Argumentation is productively studied in branches ranging from theoretical artificial intelligence to political rhetoric, but empirical analysis has suffered from a lack of freely available, unscripted argumentative dialogs. This paper presents the Internet Argument Corpus (IAC), a set of 390,704 posts in 11,800 discussions extracted from the online debate site 4forums.com. A 2866 thread/130,206 post extract of the corpus has been manually sided for topic of discussion, and subsets of this topic-labeled extract have been annotated for several dialogic and argumentative markers: degrees of agreement with a previous post, cordiality, audience-direction, combativeness, assertiveness, emotionality of argumentation, and sarcasm. As an application of this resource, the paper closes with a discussion of the relationship between discourse marker pragmatics, agreement, emotionality, and sarcasm in the IAC corpus.
Anthology ID:
L12-1643
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
812–817
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1078_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marilyn Walker, Jean Fox Tree, Pranav Anand, Rob Abbott, and Joseph King. 2012. A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 812–817, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate (Walker et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1078_Paper.pdf
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