A decision tree for annotating argumentation scheme corpora

Abstract

Quantitative approaches, necessary for e.g. computationallinguistic methods such as argument mining, require large annotated corpora of argumentative discourse. Publicly available corpora of argumentation schemes often only cover a small selection of example schemes and suffer from lowinter-annotator agreement. To address this, we present a heuristic decision tree for the classification of Walton's toplevel taxonomy of 60 schemes. An annotation study on 505 arguments resulted in a 97% classification covering 38 schemes (Cohen’s κ 0.723)