Natural Language Arguments: A Combined Approach

With the growing use of the Social Web, an increasing number of applications for exchanging opinions with other people are becoming available online. These applications are widely adopted with the consequence that the number of opinions about the debated issues increases. In order to cut in on a debate, the participants need first to evaluate the opinions in favour or against the debated issue. Argumentation theory proposes algorithms and semantics to evaluate the set of accepted arguments, given the conflicts among them. The main problem is how to automatically generate the arguments from the natural language formulation of the opinions used in these applications. Our paper addresses this problem by proposing and evaluating the use of natural language techniques to generate the arguments. In particular, we adopt the textual entailment approach, a generic framework for applied semantics, where linguistic objects are mapped by means of semantic inferences at a textual level. We couple textual entailment together with a Dung-like argumentation system which allows us to identify the arguments that are accepted in the considered online debate. The originality of the proposed framework lies in the following point: natural language debates are analyzed and the arguments are automatically extracted.