This talk revolves around debate technology as a way to track and analyze the process of public
decision-making, the exchange of arguments, and the stance of individual participants to the
points raised in a debate. Annette will present some of the insights for implementing such a real-time
system in the general public and give an overview of the key linguistic properties in natural,
spontaneous communication and the challenges and opportunities related to it for mining dialogue
structures. A particular focus will be on conventional implicatures that is crucial
in this respect: They are highly frequent in natural communication and offer strong signals of
propositional boundaries and inter-propositional relationships - the two key aspects of argumentation
mining. Annette will also showcase how an interdisciplinary collaboration with Visual Analytics allows us
to explore the dynamics of this type of communication on a large scale and conclude with an outlook
on the potential for public debate technology in other scenarios (e.g., public service encounters,
education platforms) and some of the ways with which NLP can empower the general public.