Argument Mining: Linguistic Foundations

This book is an introduction to the linguistic concepts of argumentation relevant for argument mining, an important research and development activity which can be viewed as a highly complex form of information retrieval, requiring high-level natural language processing technology. While the first four chapters develop the linguistic and conceptual aspects of argument expression, the last four are devoted to their application to argument mining. These chapters investigate the facets of argument annotation, as well as argument mining system architectures and evaluation. How annotations may be used to develop linguistic data and how to train learning algorithms is outlined. A simple implementation is then proposed. The book ends with an analysis of non-verbal argumentative discourse. Argument Mining is an introductory book for engineers or students of linguistics, artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Most, if not all, the concepts of argumentation crucial for argument mining are carefully introduced and illustrated in a simple manner.