Automated argumentation mining to the rescue? Envisioning argumentation and decision-making support for debates in open online collaboration communities

Argumentation mining, a relatively new area of discourse analysis, involves automatically identifying and structuring arguments. Following a basic introduction to argumentation, we describe a new possible domain for argumentation mining: debates in open online collaboration communities. Based on our experience with manual annotation of arguments in debates, we envision argumentation mining as the basis for three kinds of support tools, for authoring more persuasive arguments, finding weaknesses in others’ arguments, and summarizing a debate’s overall conclusions.