Argument Mining

This book aims at providing readers with an introduction to the fundamental concepts in the area of argumentation mining. This is an area with strong background in linguistics and in artificial intelligence, with clearly applied goals. In this book, we provide readers with an insight of the phenomena that are found in argumentative texts and dialogues, outlining their complexity and their characteristics. Then, we describe different approaches to formalizing these phenomena and the argumentation process in general. Finally, we present different applications of argumentation mining, in the domains of legal texts, opinion analysis, debates, and scientific literature, and we show different approaches to bridge the gap between theory and application. We devote a special emphasis to the manual annotation of argumentative texts for different purposes, in order to narrow down abstract concepts and to better understand the idiosyncrasy of argumentative phenomena, all of this with applied goals and different types of media in sight.