A System for Dispute Mediation:The Mediation Dialogue Game

We propose a dialogue game for mediation and its formalization in DGDL. This dialectical system is available as software through Arvina for automatic execution. This work expands the literature in dialectical systems, in particular those for more than two players, and shows the practical impact on mediation activity through the opportunity offered to mediators once implemented

I didn't say that!:Uses of SAY in mediation discourse

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.<br/

Theoretical foundations for illocutionary structure parsing

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. This paper is the extended version of the paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 2013), 14 June 2013, Rome, Italy. It reports on the initial steps of a project on argument mining from dialogue. Note that since then the corpus size and the annotation scheme have evolved, however, the method presented here is still valid and the project has developed accordingly

A Model for Processing Illocutionary Structures and Argumentation in Debates

International audienc

Corpus resources for dispute mediation discourse

Dispute mediation is a growing activity in the resolution of conflicts, and more and more research emerge to enhance and better understand this (until recently) understudied practice. Corpus analyses are necessary to study discourse in this context; yet, little data is available, mainly because of its confidentiality principle. After proposing hints and avenues to acquire transcripts of mediation sessions, this paper presents the Dispute Mediation Corpus, which gathers annotated excerpts of mediation dialogues. Although developed as part of a project on argumentation, it is freely available and the text data can be used by anyone. This first-ever open corpus of mediation interactions can be of interest to scholars studying discourse, but also conflict resolution, argumentation, linguistics, communication, etc. We advocate for using and extending this resource that may be valuable to a large variety of domains of research, particularly those striving to enhance the study of the rapidly growing activity of dispute mediation

Automatically identifying transitions between locutions in dialogue

International audienceThe contribution of this paper is theoretical foundations for dialogical argument mining, as well as initial implementation in software for dialogue processing. Automatically identifying the structure of reasoning from natural language is extremely demanding. Our hypothesis is that the structure of dialogue can yield additional clues as to argument structures that are created and cocreated. Our work has been performed using the MM2012 corpus in OVA+

A Model for Processing Illocutionary Structures and Argumentation in Debates

In this paper, we briefly present the objectives of Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) and the formal structure which is proposed for dialogues. Then, we introduce our development corpus, and a computational model designed for the identification of discourse minimal units in the context of argumentation and the illocutionary force associated with each unit. We show the categories of resources which are needed and how they can be reused in different contexts

The argument web:an online ecosystem of tools, systems and services for argumentation

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