The field of computational models of argument is emerging as an important aspect of artificial intelligence research. The reason for this is based on the recognition that if we are to develop robust intelligent systems, then it is imperative that they can handle incomplete and inconsistent information in a way that somehow emulates the way humans tackle such a complex task. And one of the key ways that humans do this is to use argumentation -either internally, by evaluating arguments and counterarguments -or externally, by for instance entering into a discussion or debate where arguments are exchanged. As we report in this review, recent developments in the field are leading to technology for artificial argumentation, in the legal, medical, and e-government domains, and interesting tools for argument mining, for debating technologies, and for argumentation solvers are emerging.

The increasing popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has led to a rise in the presence of hate and aggressive speech on these platforms. Despite the number of approaches recently proposed in the Natural Language Processing research area for detecting these forms of abusive language, the issue of identifying hate speech at scale is still an unsolved problem. In this article, we propose a robust neural architecture that is shown to perform in a satisfactory way across different languages; namely, English, Italian, and German. We address an extensive analysis of the obtained experimental results over the three languages to gain a better understanding of the contribution of the different components employed in the system, both from the architecture point of view (i.e., Long Short Term Memory, Gated Recurrent Unit, and bidirectional Long Short Term Memory) and from the feature selection point of view (i.e., ngrams, social network–specific features, emotion lexica, emojis, word embeddings). To address such in-depth analysis, we use three freely available datasets for hate speech detection on social media in English, Italian, and German.

Argument mining is the research area aiming at extracting natural language arguments and their relations from text, with the final goal of providing machine-processable structured data for computational models of argument. This research topic has started to attract the attention of a small community of researchers around 2014, and it is nowadays counted as one of the most promising research areas in Artificial Intelligence in terms of growing of the community, funded projects, and involvement of companies. In this paper, we present the argument mining tasks, and we discuss the obtained results in the area from a data-driven perspective. An open discussion highlights the main weaknesses suffered by the existing work in the literature, and proposes open challenges to be faced in the future.