Argumentation in the 2016 US presidential elections: annotated corpora of television debates and social media reaction

Authors:

• Jacky Visser,
• Barbara Konat,
• Rory Duthie,
• Marcin Koszowy,
• Katarzyna Budzynska,
• Chris Reed

Abstract

In this paper we present US2016, the largest publicly available set of corpora of annotated dialogical argumentation. The annotation covers argumentative relations, dialogue acts and pragmatic features. The corpora comprise transcriptions of television debates leading up to the 2016 US presidential elections, and reactions to the debates on Reddit. These two constitutive parts of the corpora are integrated by means of the intertextual correspondence between them. The rhetorical richness and high argument density of the communicative context results in cross-genre corpora that are robust resources for the study of the dialogical dynamics of argumentation in three ways: first, in empirical strands of research in discourse analysis and argumentation studies; second, in the burgeoning field of argument mining where automatic techniques require such data; and third, in formulating algorithmic techniques for sensemaking through the development of Argument Analytics.