Synopsis/Call

"6th Workshop on Argument Mining", held in conjunction with the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019), and chaired by Benno Stein and Henning Wachsmuth.

Argument mining (also known as "argumentation mining") is a young and emerging research area within computational linguistics. At its heart, argument mining involves the automatic identification of argumentative structures in free text, such as the conclusions, premises, and inference schemes of arguments as well as their interrelations and counter-considerations.

To date, researchers have investigated argument mining on genres such as legal documents, product reviews, news articles, online debates, user-generated web discourse, Wikipedia articles, academic literature, persuasive essays, tweets, and dialogues. Recently, also argument quality assessment came into focus. In addition, argument mining is inherently tied to stance and sentiment analysis, since every argument carries a stance towards its topic, often expressed with sentiment.

Argument mining gives rise to various practical applications of great importance. In particular, it provides methods that can find and visualize the main pro and con arguments in a text corpus - or even on in an argument search on the web - towards a topic or query of interest. In instructional contexts, written and diagrammed arguments represent educational data that can be mined for conveying and assessing students' command of course material. In information retrieval, argument mining is expected to play a salient role in the emerging field of conversational search. And with the IBM Debater, technology based on argument mining recently received a lot of media attention.

While solutions to basic tasks such as component segmentation and classification slowly become mature, many tasks remain largely unsolved, particularly in more open genres and topical domains. Success in argument mining requires interdisciplinary approaches informed by NLP technology, theories of semantics, pragmatics and discourse, knowledge of discourse in application domains, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, argumentation theory, and computational models of argumentation. [proceedings]

Important Dates

  • Submission due: April 26, 2019 May 3, 2019
  • Notification of acceptance: May 24, 2019 May 28, 2019
  • Camera-ready papers due: June 3, 2019 June 5, 2019
  • Workshop: August 1, 2019

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