Illocutionary structure in real language use is intricate and complex, and nowhere more so than in argument and debate. Identifying this structure without any theoretical scaffolding is extremely challenging even for humans. New work in Inference Anchoring Theory has provided significant advances in such scaffolding which are helping to allow the analytical challenges of argumentation structure to be tackled. This paper demonstrates how these advances can also pave the way to automated and semi-automated research in understanding the structure of natural debate.

The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory.

Language resources for studying doctor–patient interaction are rare, primarily due to the ethical issues related to recording real medical consultations. Rarer still are resources that involve more than one healthcare professional in consultation with a patient, despite many chronic conditions requiring multiple areas of expertise for effective treatment. In this paper, we present the design, construction and output of the Patient Consultation Corpus, a multimodal corpus of simulated consultations between a patient portrayed by an actor, and at least two healthcare professionals with different areas of expertise. As well as the transcribed text from each consultation, the corpus also contains audio and video where for each consultation: the audio consists of individual tracks for each participant, allowing for clear identification of speakers; the video consists of two framings for each participant—upper-body and face—allowing for close analysis of behaviours and gestures. Having presented the design and construction of the corpus, we then go on to briefly describe how the multi-modal nature of the corpus allows it to be analysed from several different perspectives.

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While several taxonomies of meta-discourse exist, none clearly explains speakers' strategies in mediation. Mediators, however, seem to rely a lot on meta-discourse to manage the argument while preserving their neutrality. This article proposes corpus analyses to detect mediation participants' discourse strategies and highlight the role and function of a meta-discourse element-the verb 'to say'. This paper is a first step towards the elaboration of a taxonomy for the analysis of argumentative meta-discourse, and brings new insights in meta-discourse in argumentative dialogues and mediation discourse in general.