In the last few years, argument mining has emerged as a new field that aims to identify argumentative portions in natural language text, and to uncover the structure of the underlying arguments. Domains that have been addressed include legal text, student essays, and customer reviews (as a follow-up step to sentiment analysis). In this talk, which largely presents joint work with Andreas Peldszus, we suggest an annotation scheme for argumentation and present results on automatic analysis of our „argumentative microtext corpus“ - a collection of 115 short texts that have been produced by students in response to a trigger question (often of the form „Should one (not) do X ?“) We present results from a joint inference approach (Peldsus/Stede 2015) and from a recent experiment that maps annotations of discourse structure (in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory) to argumentation structure (Peldszus/Stede submitted).

A. Peldszus, M. Stede: Joint prediction in MST-style discourse parsing for argumentation mining. Proc. of EMNLP 2015.
A. Peldszus, M. Stede: Rhetorical structure and argumentation structure in monologue text. Submitted.