Towards segment-based recognition of argumentation structure in short texts

Despite recent advances in discourse parsing and causality detection, the automatic recognition of argumentation structure of authentic texts is still a very challenging task. To approach this problem, we collected a small corpus of German microtexts in a text generation experiment, resulting in texts that are authentic but of controlled linguistic and rhetoric complexity. We show that trained annotators can determine the argumentation structure on these microtexts reliably. We experiment with different machine learning approaches for automatic argumentation structure recognition on various levels of granularity of the scheme. Given the complex nature of such a discourse understanding tasks, the first results presented here are promising, but invite for further investigation.