Annotation with adpositional argumentation: Guidelines for building a Gold Standard Corpus of argumentative discourse

This paper explains Adpositional Argumentation (AdArg), a new method for annotating arguments expressed in natural language. In describing this method, it provides the guidelines for designing a Gold Standard Corpus (GSC) of argumentative discourse in terms of so-called argumentative adpositional trees (arg-adtrees). The theoretical starting points of AdArg draw on the combination of the linguistic representation framework of Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) with the argument categorisation framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA). After an explanation of these two frameworks, it is shown how AdArg can be used for annotating arguments expressed in natural language. This is done by providing the arg-adtrees of four concrete examples of arguments, which substantiate the four basic argument forms distinguished in the PTA. The present exposition of the fundamental tenets of AdArg enables the building of a GSC of argumentative discourse, that means an annotated corpus of texts and discussions of undisputable high-quality according to argumentation theory experts. Such a GSC should be conveniently annotated in terms of arg-adtrees, which is a time-consuming process, as it needs highly skilled annotators and human supervision. However, its role is crucial for developing instruments for computer-assisted argumentation analysis and eventual application based on machine learning natural language processing algorithms.