Political debates offer a rare opportunity for citizens to compare the candidates' positions on the most controversial topics of the campaign. Thus they represent a natural application scenario for Argument Mining. As existing research lacks solid empirical investigation of the typology of argument components in political debates, we fill this gap by proposing an Argument Mining approach to political debates. We address this task in an empirical manner by annotating 39 political debates from the last 50 years of US presidential campaigns, creating a new corpus of 29k argument components, labeled as premises and claims. We then propose two tasks: (1) identifying the argumentative components in such debates, and (2) classifying them as premises and claims. We show that feature-rich SVM learners and Neural Network architectures outperform standard baselines in Argument Mining over such complex data. We release the new corpus USElecDeb60To16 and the accompanying software under free licenses to the research community.

Fallacies play a prominent role in argumentation since antiquity due to their contribution to argumentation in critical thinking education. Their role is even more crucial nowadays as contemporary argumentation technologies face challenging tasks as misleading and manipulative information detection in news articles and political discourse, and counter-narrative generation. Despite some work in this direction, the issue of classifying arguments as being fallacious largely remains a challenging and an unsolved task. Our contribution is twofold: first, we present a novel annotated resource of 31 political debates from the U.S. Presidential Campaigns, where we annotated six main categories of fallacious arguments (i.e., ad hominem, appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, false cause, slogan, slippery slope) leading to 1628 annotated fallacious arguments; second, we tackle this novel task of fallacious argument classification and we define a neural architecture based on transformers outperforming state-of-the-art results and standard baselines. Our results show the important role played by argument components and relations in this task.

Political debates are the means used by political candidates to put forward and justify their positions in front of the electors with respect to the issues at stake. Argument mining is a novel research area in Artificial Intelligence, aiming at analyzing discourse on the pragmatics level and applying a certain argumentation theory to model and automatically analyze textual data. In this paper, we present DISPUTool, a tool designed to ease the work of historians and social science scholars in analyzing the argumentative content of political speeches. More precisely, DISPUTool allows to explore and automatically identify argumentative components over the 39 political debates from the last 50 years of US presidential campaigns (1960-2016).

Political debates are one of the most salient moments of an election campaign, where candidates are challenged to discuss the main contemporary and historical issues in a country. These debates represent a natural ground for argumentative analysis, which has always been employed to investigate political discourse structure and strategy in philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we present DISPUTool 2.0, an automated tool which relies on Argument Mining methods to analyse the political debates from the US presidential campaigns to extract argument components (i.e., premise and claim) and relations (i.e., support and attack), and highlight fallacious arguments. DISPUTool 2.0 allows also for the automatic analysis of a piece of a debate proposed by the user to identify and classify the arguments contained in the text. A REST API is provided to exploit the tool's functionalities.