A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate

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, audiencedirection, 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 247 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.