Classifying arguments by scheme

Abstract

Argumentation schemes are structures or templates for various kinds of arguments. The argumentation scheme classification system that we present in this paper intro-duces a new task in this field. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to classify arguments into argumentation schemes automatically. Given the text of an argument with premises and conclusion identified, we clas-sify it as an instance of one of five common schemes, using general features and other features specific to each scheme, including lexical, syntactic, and shallow semantic fea-tures. We achieve accuracies of 63–91 % in one-against-others classification and 80–94% in pairwise classification (baseline = 50 % in both cases). We design a pipeline framework whose ultimate goal is to reconstruct the implicit premises in an argument, and our argumentation scheme classification system is aimed to address the third component in this framework. While the first two portions of this framework can be fulfilled by work of other researchers, we propose a syntactic-based approach to the last component of this framework. The completion of the entire system