A Shared Task on Argumentation Mining in Newspaper Editorials

This paper proposes a shared task for the identification of the argumentative structure in newspaper editorials. By the term “argumentative structure” we refer to the sequence of argumentative units in the text along with the relations between them. The main contribution is a large-scale dataset with more than 200 annotated editorials, which shall help argumentation mining researchers to evaluate and compare their systems in a standardized manner. The paper details how we model and manually identify argumentative structures in order to build this evaluation resource. Altogether, we consider the proposed task as a constructive step towards improving writing assistance systems and debating technologies.