Towards an Analysis of Argumentation Structure and the Strength of Arguments in News Editorials

Editorials in general fall under persuasive texts.These types of texts intend to persuade the readers over a certain issue or topic.Hence persuasion involves the use of persuasive elements(opinion words and expressions)and facts presented in the form of arguments.A closer look at editorials reveals that they consist of an argumentation structure consisting of an opening statement(also known as the conclusion in argumentation theory[6,7,12,13,15]),which in turn is supported by other statements(known as the supports in argumentation theory)for or against the conclusion.These supports as well as the conclusion can be either facts or opinions.The underlying supports for or against a conclusion may be further developed,illustrated,justified,elaborated etc.by means of text fragments,also widely known as rhetoric relations[11]. The proposed work is aimed towards analyzing the argumentation structure and the strengths of arguments in news editorials thus determining the persuasiveness inherent in the texts.The result is a discourse analysis of opinions as stated in editorial texts producing a kind of dedicated semantic representation. Ultimately, the analyzed argumentation structure would be used to construct a synthesis of positive and negative arguments on a particular topic from one or several editorials(single or multiple sources)over a common date or a span of time.Such a synthesis can provide a relatively true view of how an event has been perceived by the public in general and is of much interest to journalists, public figures and political analysts.We also will be analyzing the change in opinions taking time as an evaluative factor for change as reported in [8,9].In order to automate the analysis as well as the synthesis construction process,we would be developing a computational model that would suggest methods and appropriate techniques.The manually annotated texts and collected editorials would serve as training data and test data respectively for validating the computation model over ideal outputs[1]. Currently, the work is in its preliminary stage,primarily focused towards analyzing the different facets of supports and rhetorical relations required for an adequate semantic-pragmatic analysis of the underlying argumentation structures in editorials.In parallel with the analysis,we are also in the process of specifying tags for annotating editorials in order to establish patterns characteristic to the different facets of support.We noted that the opinions and the argumentation structure in editorials are not so apparent and structured,which makes synthesis construction a challenging task.