Preliminary Results from an Argument Corpus
the IX Symposium on Social Communication, page 576--580. Santiago de Cuba, (2005)Abstract
As reported in (Katzav et al., 2003), the University of Dundee has been developing a small corpus of examples of argumentation from a variety of domains (newspaper editorials, advertising, parliamentary records, judicial summaries, etc.) and a variety of regions (including India, Japan, South Africa, UK, Australia, US and others). This corpus has been analysed according to theories of argument structure (van Eemeren et al., 1996) as part of a project examining the role and structure of argumentation schemes linguistic forms expressing stereotypical patterns of reasoning that form the 'glue' of interpersonal rationality. The corpus represents the first resource of its kind, and it is now being utilised by software systems in both teaching and research contexts. After explaining briefly the motivation and methodology adopted by the data collection and analysis work, this paper presents the first results of preliminary analyses of the corpus as a whole, and explores two distinct areas. The first is a straightforward investigation of surface features of the analysed arguments. Through such investigation, general differences between types of argument are identified. The second area is then a deeper exploration of scheme use, assessing links between scheme cladistics and their domain of use. This represents the first empirical assessment of real-world use of a complex set of argumentation schemes.