Some Facets of Argument Mining for Opinion Analysis

In this paper, we present some foundational elements related to argument extraction in opinion texts with the objective to further analyse and synthetise user preferences and value systems as they emerge in such texts. We show that (1) within the context of opinionated expressions, a number of evaluative expressions with a ’heavy’ semantic load receive an argumentative interpretation and (2) that the association of an evaluative expression with a discourse structure such as an elaboration, an illustration, or a reformulation must also be interpreted as an argument. We develop a conceptual semantics of these relations and show how they are implemented in the Dislog programming language on the platform, dedicated to discourse analysis.