Identification of connected arguments based on reasoning schemes “from expert opinion”

Abstract

The work presented describes a combined approach to the partial extraction of the argumentative structure of a text that can be employed in the absence of sufficient annotated data to apply efficiently the machine learning methods for the direct detection of arguments and their relations. In this case, argument identification is performed by using the patterns of argumentation indicators created by a linguist and automatically expanded. These patterns enable the recognition of specific argument types with fine precision. In this study, arguments “from expert opinion” serve as such a pivot type. Besides, potential relations between recognized arguments are analyzed by dividing the text into superphrasal units (fragments united by one topic). The criterion for connecting arguments in an argumentative structure is their inclusion in the same superphrasal unit. An experiment for identifying potentially related arguments is conducted on a set of popular science texts with a minimum size of 1000 words.