Projection of Argumentative Corpora from Source to Target Languages

Argumentative corpora are costly to create and are available in only few languages with English dominating the area. In this paper we release the first publicly available Mandarin argumentative corpus. The corpus is created by exploiting the idea of comparable corpora from Statistical Machine Translation. We use existing corpora in English and manually map the claims and premises to comparable corpora in Mandarin. We also implement a simple solution to automate this approach with the view of creating argumentative corpora in other less-resourced languages. In this way we introduce a new task of multi-lingual argument mapping that can be evaluated using our English-Mandarin argumentative corpus. The preliminary results of our automatic argument mapper mirror the simplicity of our approach, but provide a baseline for further improvements.