From Discourse Analysis to Argumentation Schemes and Back: Relations and Differences

In argumentation theory, argumentation schemes are abstract argument forms expressed in natural language, commonly used in everyday conversational argumentation. In computational linguistics, discourse analysis have been conducted to identify the discourse structure of connected text, i.e. the nature of the discourse relationships between sentences. In this paper, we propose to couple these two research lines in order to (i) use the discourse relationships to automatically detect the argumentation schemes in natural language text, and (ii) use argumentation schemes to reason over natural language arguments composed by premises and a conclusion. In particular, we analyze how argumentation schemes fit into the discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank and which are the argumentation schemes which emerge from this natural language corpus.