Theoretical foundations for illocutionary structure parsing

Abstract

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.

Argumentation in the 2016 US presidential elections: annotated corpora of television debates and social media reaction

“…The intermediate CASS scores in Table 3 show that the annotation of illocutionary connections turns out to be more challenging than that of propositional relations, discourse transitions, and segmentation (all recorded as Cohen's j values, except for segmentation, which is calculated in terms of Fournier and Inkpen (2012)'s S metric for segmentation similarity). The difficulty of annotating illocutionary connections is not surprising, as Budzynska et al (2016) previously observed that the closeness between certain types of illocutionary connections can make them difficult to distinguish. Examples (4) and (5) are two cases in point.…”

Argumentation Theory for Mathematical Argument

“…[punctuation modified] Karttunen's concept of "discourse referents," illustrated in the quote above, underlies Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle, 1993) and its extensions. While the developers of IAT acknowledge the generality of Structured Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), in particular, they criticise it for making "assumptions of context-independent semantics" (Budzynska et al, 2016). Nevertheless, DRT has been successfully applied to model some aspects of mathematical discourse, and we will discuss that work further in Section 5, and contrast it with our orientation here.…”

Detecting Argumentative Discourse Acts with Linguistic Alignment

“…Rhetorical Questioning/Challenging is the most difficult. As noted by Budzynska et al (2016), there is no common specification for Rhetorical Questioning. We follow their definition, by which Pure and Assertive Questioning/Challenging ask for the speaker's opinion/evidence, and the Assertive and Rhetorical types communicate the speakers own opinion.…”