The paper discusses a software system designed to support the study of argumentation in Russian-language popular science texts. This system is based on an ontology built on modern principles of argumentation modeling. In particular, this ontology contains formal descriptions of typical reasoning schemes that are used for annotating texts, analyzing the arguments presented in them, and assessment of its persuasiveness relative to a given audience. A method of argumentative marking of a text is proposed, which provides the allocation of statements and the construction on their basis of an argumentation graph using knowledge about typical reasoning schemes. The paper also describes a set of web tools that provide the creation of thematic corpora, visualization of the argumentation ontology used, the construction of the argumentation graph, the selection of argumentation indicators in the texts, as well as the search for various entities in the text corpora in ontology terms. Analytical tools are presented by means of collecting statistical information on the occurrence of typical elements of argumentation in the body of texts, by means of researching indicators of argumentation and by means of analyzing the persuasiveness of argumentation. The novelty of the work consists in the development of an original methodology for studying argumentation in popular science discourse, based on the ontology of argumentation and supported by a specialized web platform.

The proposed work is performed as a part of an on-going research project aimed at creation of discourse annotated corpus of popular science texts written in Russian. Annotation is carried out within the framework of a multi-level model of discourse, which considers the text from the perspective of genre, rhetorical and argumentative organization. We conduct a comparative study of the rhetorical and argument annotations, discuss their similarities and differences on the segment and structural levels and show them on the examples of standard schemes of reasoning described in D. Walton’s theory of structured argumentation: “Argument from Expert Opinion”, “Argument from Example”, and “Argument from Cause to Effect”. Special attention is paid to discourse markers registered during annotation as key indicators of discourse structure. We report the results of the experiment with argument indicator patterns, based on the list of rhetorical markers, and aimed at the extraction of “from Expert Opinion” arguments.

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