5th Workshop on Argument Mining

About the Workshop

Argument mining (also, “argumentation mining”) is a relatively new research field within the rapidly evolving area of Computational Argumentation. The tasks pursued within this field are highly challenging with many important practical applications. These include automatically identifying argumentative structures within discourse, e.g., premises, conclusion, and argumentation scheme of each argument, as well as relationships between pairs of arguments and their components. To date, researchers have investigated a plethora of methods to address these tasks in various areas, including legal documents, user generated Web discourse, on-line debates, product reviews, academic literature, newspaper articles, dialogical domains, and Wikipedia articles. Relevant manually annotated corpora are released at an increasing pace, further enhancing the research in the field. In addition, argument mining is inherently tied to sentiment analysis, since an argument frequently carries a clear sentiment towards its topic. Correspondingly, this year’s workshop will be coordinated with the corresponding WASSA workshop, aiming to have a joint poster session.

Argument mining can give rise to various applications of great practical importance. For instance, by developing methods that can extract and visualize the main pro and con arguments raised in a collection of documents towards a query of interest, one can enhance data-driven decision making. In instructional contexts, argumentation is a pedagogically important tool for conveying and assessing the students' command of course material, as well as for advancing critical thinking. Written and diagrammed arguments by students represent educational data that can be mined for purposes of assessment and instruction. This is especially important given the wide-spread adoption of computer-supported peer review, computerized essay grading, and large-scale online courses and MOOCs. Additionally, mining pros and cons may be useful in multiple business applications, for instance, for researching a company or considering the potential of a possible investment.

Success in argument mining requires interdisciplinary approaches informed by natural language processing technology, artificial intelligence approaches, theories of semantics, pragmatics and discourse, knowledge of discourse of domains such as law and science, argumentation theory, computational models of argumentation, and cognitive psychology. The goal of this workshop is to provide a follow-on forum to the last four years’ Argument Mining workshops at ACL and EMNLP, the major research forum devoted to argument mining in all domains of discourse.

Important Dates

• Submission due: July 12, 2018 July 17, 2018
• Author Notification: August 18, 2018
• Camera Ready: August 31, 2018
• Workshop Date: November 1, 2018
• Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/argmining2018
• Note: All deadlines are calculated at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time (UTC -7h).

Specific topics for submissions include but are not limited to:
• Automatic identification of argument units (e.g., premises and conclusion; data/evidence, claim and warrant) and their inter-relations within small or large collections of documents
• Automatic identification of argumentation schemes and relationships to discourse goals (e.g., stages of a ‘critical discussion’) and/or rhetorical strategies
• Creation/evaluation of argument annotation schemes, relationship of argument annotation to linguistic and discourse structure annotation scheme
• Automatic and semi-automatic argument annotation methods and tools
• Creation of high-quality annotated datasets and benchmarks
• NLP methods and AI models developed for argument mining and computational argumentation tasks
• Applications of argument mining and computational argumentation to various domains and data, including news corpora, Wikipedia articles, technical documents, and domain-specific corpora such as legal documents, scientific papers, dialogue data, consumer reviews, user generated content (UGC), and students’ written essays
• Descriptions of implemented systems and tools for argument mining;
• Descriptions and proposals for shared tasks

Submission Information

A LONG PAPER submission consists of a paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus two pages for references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page (up to nine pages with unlimited pages for references) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

A SHORT PAPER submission consists of up to four (4) pages of content, plus two pages for references; final versions of short papers will be given one additional page (up to five pages in the proceedings and unlimited pages for references).

Papers that describe systems or tools are also invited to give a DEMO of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either “full paper + demo” or “short paper + demo” under “Submission Category” in the START submission page.

The workshop adopts ACL’s new policies for submission, review, and citation. Submissions that violate any of these policies will be rejected without review.

Please use the EMNLP 2018 style sheets for formatting your paper: http://emnlp2018.org

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/argmining2018

Double Submission

Double submission is not forbidden. Upon acceptance at either event, the submission must be withdrawn from the other. Note, we would appreciate helping us save our reviewers efforts, and avoid submitting (or withdraw early) papers that are on track to be accepted elsewhere.

Important Dates

• Submission due: July 12, 2018 July 17, 2018
• Author Notification: August 18, 2018
• Camera Ready: August 31, 2018
• Workshop Date: November 1, 2018
• Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/argmining2018
• Note: All deadlines are calculated at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time (UTC -7h).