A News Editorial Corpus for Mining Argumentation Strategies

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’ Kappa 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.
Anthology ID:
C16-1324
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
3433–3443
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1324
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Khalid Al-Khatib, Henning Wachsmuth, Johannes Kiesel, Matthias Hagen, and Benno Stein. 2016. A News Editorial Corpus for Mining Argumentation Strategies. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 3433–3443, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
A News Editorial Corpus for Mining Argumentation Strategies (Al-Khatib et al., COLING 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1324.pdf