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Elena Musi

Columbia University, Data Science, Post-Doc

Columbia University, Center for Computational Learning Systems, Post-Doc

Universita' della Svizzera Italiana, Istituto di argomentazione, linguistica e semiotica, Post-Doc

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I am a Language Engineer in Amazon Alexa Machine Learning team. During my postdoctoral research at Columbia University I have worked at the crossroads between Semantics, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Studies, and Computational Social Science. My expertise lies in the investigation of social and interactional meaning providing analyses grounded in linguistic theory for empirical validations through computational models.
My main research topics of interest are frames in the research area of Computational Linguistics, especially Semantics and Pragmatics

---analysis and modelling of types of reasonings in argumentative discourse
---building semantic and pragmatic ontologies for modelling (dis)agreement space in discourse
----detecting argumentative discourse relation with a particular focus on concessions
---mapping of arguments in large-scale controversies

The created linguistic resources and project outputs are available at:
https://github.com/musielena
Supervisors: Smaranda Muresan, Mark AAkhus, Andrea Rocci
Phone: 0019293237906

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Papers by Elena Musi

A Multi-layer Annotated Corpus of Argumentative Text: From Argument Schemes to Discourse Relations

Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum

Proceedings of the Argumentation Mining Workshop at EMNLP, 2017

Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumenta... more Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumentative structure that consists of argument components (e.g., claims, premises) and their argumentative relations (e.g., support, attack). Less emphasis has been placed on analyzing the semantic types of argument components. We propose a two-tiered annotation scheme to label claims and premises and their semantic types in an online persuasive forum, Change My View, with the long-term goal of understanding what makes a message persuasive. Premises are annotated with the three types of persuasive modes: ethos, logos, pathos, while claims are labeled as interpretation, evaluation , agreement, or disagreement, the latter two designed to account for the dialog-ical nature of our corpus. We aim to answer three questions: 1) can humans reliably annotate the semantic types of argument components? 2) are types of premises/claims positioned in recurrent orders? and 3) are certain types of claims and/or premises more likely to appear in persuasive messages than in non-persuasive messages?

Discovering Argumentative Patterns in Energy Polylogues: A Macroscope for Argument Mining

by Elena Musi and Mark Aakhus

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint ... more A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective (e.g., group, online community) manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argu-mentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereo-typical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope's design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices.

Tracing the roots of defeasibility in evaluative and interpretative standpoints: appearance verbs as argumentative indicators in opinion articles

Argumentation and Language—Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations. Springer, Cham., 2018

This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opin... more This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opinion articles, taking as a case study the Italian verb sembrare ('seem'). Appearance verbs, due to their lexical semantics and their modal-evidential functions are privileged candidates to indicate argument schemes. The linguistic literature has investigated the links between inferential evidentiality and epistemic modality, while it has devoted little attention to the links between the structure of the underlying inferences and degrees of defeasibility. Argumentation Theory has widely explored defeasible reasoning without making reference to the linguistic clues expressing and constraining the type of defeasibility at issue. Through a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation this study i) shows that appearance verbs work as indicators of defeasible reasoning, and ii) provides a systematic methodology to trace back the roots of defeasibility in the inferential configuration of arguments. As a theoretical outcome, the analysis reveals that there are no argument schemes or types of reasonings (abductive, deductive, inductive) more defeasible than others. The roots of defeasibility can be traced back only if the whole inferential configuration, strictly tied to the context, is reconstructed.

Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum

by Elena Musi and Alyssa Hwang

Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumenta... more Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumentative structure that consists of argument components (e.g., claims, premises) and their argumentative relations (e.g., support, attack). Less emphasis has been placed on analyzing the semantic types of argument components. We propose a two-tiered annotation scheme to label claims and premises and their semantic types in an online persuasive forum, Change My View, with the long-term goal of understanding what makes a message persuasive. Premises are annotated with the three types of persuasive modes: ethos, logos, pathos, while claims are labeled as interpretation, evaluation , agreement, or disagreement, the latter two designed to account for the dialog-ical nature of our corpus. We aim to answer three questions: 1) can humans reliably annotate the semantic types of argument components? 2) are types of premises/claims positioned in recurrent orders? and 3) are certain types of claims and/or premises more likely to appear in persuasive messages than in non-persuasive messages?

A Multi-layer Annotated Corpus of Argumentative Text: From Argument Schemes to Discourse Relations

by Elena Musi and Andrea Rocci

We present a multi-layer annotated corpus of 112 argumentative microtexts encompassing not only a... more We present a multi-layer annotated corpus of 112 argumentative microtexts encompassing not only argument structure and discourse relations (Stede et al., 2016), but also argument schemes — the inferential relations linking premises to claims. We propose a set of guidelines for the annotation of argument schemes both for support and attack relations, and a new user-friendly annotation tool. The multi-layer annotated corpus allows us to conduct an initial study of dependencies between discourse relations (according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988)) and argument schemes. Our main contribution is that of offering the first resource for the combined study of (argumentative) discourse relations and inferential moves.

ChangeMyView Through Concessions: Do Concessions Increase Persuasion

In discourse studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increas... more In discourse studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increase persuasion. We aim to empirically test this hypothesis by calculating the distribution of argumentative concessions in persuasive vs. non-persuasive comments from the ChangeMyView subreddit. This constitutes a challenging task since concessions are not always part of an argument. Drawing from a theoretically-informed typology of concessions, we conduct an annotation task to label a set of polysemous lexical markers as introducing an argumentative concession or not and we observe their distribution in threads that achieved and did not achieve persuasion. For the annotation, we used both expert and novice annotators. With the ultimate goal of conducting the study on large datasets, we present a self-training method to automatically identify argumentative concessions using linguistically motivated features. We achieve a moderate F1 of 57.4% on the development set and 46.0% on the test set via the self-training method. These results are comparable to state of the art results on similar tasks of identifying explicit discourse connective types from the Penn Discourse Treebank. Our findings from the manual labeling and the classification experiments indicate that the type of argumentative concessions we investigated is almost equally likely to be used in winning and losing arguments from the ChangeMyView dataset. While this result seems to contradict theoretical assumptions, we provide some reasons for this discrepancy related to the ChangeMyView subreddit.

How did you change my view? A corpus-based study of concessions' argumentative role

In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change ... more In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments.

How did you change my view? A corpus-based study of concessions' argumentative role

In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change ... more In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments.

Evidently epistential adverbs are argumentative indicators: A corpus-based study

Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of argumen... more Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of arguments. However, a comprehensive lexicon of these linguistic devices is so far lacking due to the scarcity of corpora argumentatively annotated and the absence of an empirically validated analytic methodology. Recent studies have shown that modals, that express that things might be otherwise, and evidentials, that point to the presence of information sources, are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators. On these grounds, we propose a systematic, non-language specific corpus-based procedure to identify indicators of argumentative discourse relations. We test the design of a multi-level annotation through the analysis of the English and Italian epistential adverbs evidently and evidentemente in comparable corpora of newspaper articles. We show that the annotation guidelines achieve consistent analytical results with expert annotators. Data analysis reveals that the two adverbs work as argumentative indicator both at the structural and at the inferential level: besides pointing to the presence of premises-conclusion relations, they recurrently pattern with causal argument schemes from the effect to the cause. The Italian adverb evidentemente is less polysemous and more frequent, thus working as a more reliable indicator.

Building an ontology of (dis)agreement space for argument mining

by Elena Musi, Debanjan Ghosh, Mark Aakhus, and Nina Wacholder

Tanto varrebbe dirlo subito: indicatore di confutazione per analogia e per alternative

1. Introduzione Questo lavoro è dedicato all'analisi dell'espressione tanto varrebbe da un punto ... more 1. Introduzione Questo lavoro è dedicato all'analisi dell'espressione tanto varrebbe da un punto di vista semantico e argomentativo. 1 L'interesse per questa tematica d'analisi è sorto durante un incontro della scuola dottorale in Lingua, letteratura e civiltà italiana dell'Università della Svizzera italiana in una presentazione di Alberta Fasano, incentrata sulla tematica dell'ékphrasis nell'opera gaddiana. Tra i testi analizzati figurava l'articolo "Il cetriolo dei crivelli", pubblicato da Gadda sul quotidiano Il Giorno, scritto in occasione di una mostra sui crivelleschi a Venezia. Uno stralcio dell'articolo è qui di seguito riportato: (1) Curiosi la pera o mela di destra, e, più, il cetriolo pèndulo a sinistra: quel cetriolo ch'è un poco una idea fissa del grande pittore: una costante insistita della minuzia realistica d'un pittore di genere, come taluno ha ritenuto di poter dire: imagine ovunque sorda all'idea «frutto», all'idea «ghirlanda», all'idea «trono della Madonna ad altare», eppur zucchescamente significativa d'un'umile campestre offerta esornante l'altare, per un addobbo amorosamente recato dalla campagna padovana o comunque irrigua e solare: e serenamente, pacatamente zucchifera. Cucùrbite a pezzi, a novembre dicembre, nella delicata povertà delle minestre paesane, cetrioli di insalate estive, dono adeguato di poveri, d'infaticati ortolani, che inghirlandi a lato o sopra il fasto de' broccati e la preziosa lucidezza de' marmi lo schienale del trono della Madonna: e vi rechi i lumi gialli e dorati del settembre che matura colocinte, ossia zucche. Tanto varrebbe [chiamar «minuzie realistiche d'un pittore di genere» le rose e le vïole del leopardiano sabato]; o la gallina tornata in su la via.» [Gadda, Il cetriolo del Crivelli, pubblicato su Il Giorno, 24 ottobre 1961]

Genre norms and variation in online reviews: the dimension of information source

by Johanna Miecznikowski and Elena Musi

In: Pandolfi, E.M. et al., Studies on language norms in context. Duisburg Papers on research in language and culture (pp. 303-336), Jan 2017

Based on an Italian corpus of contributions to comment spaces of online reviews in different doma... more Based on an Italian corpus of contributions to comment spaces of online reviews in different domains, we argue that some of these contributions are user reviews. We show that users position themselves as legitimate contributors by conforming to genre conventions that are central in official reviews, in particular to the requirement that the reviewer must possess direct knowledge of the reviewed object. Other genre norms are not observed, thus adapting the genre to the context of comment spaces.

Strategies of objectification in opinion articles the case of ev

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil dr... more This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil drilling issues in USA. It will be shown through multilevel annotation that evidentials, depending on their lexical semantics, indicate specific types of standpoints and premises as far as (inter)subjectivity and objectivity are concerned.

Obviously Epistentials are Argumentative Indicators: Evidence from an Italian and English Corpus of Newspaper Articles

by Elena Musi and Andrea Rocci

Recent studies have shown that epistentials are good candidates to work as argumentative indicato... more Recent studies have shown that epistentials are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators, useful tool for argumentation mining. In this paper we investigate the argumentative properties of the Italian adverbs evidentemente and ovviamente and their English counterparts evidently and obviously in comparable corpora of opinion articles through a multilayer annotation. The results show that evidentemente and evidently presuppose the presence of premises-conclusion relations where premises are textually adjacent, while ovviamente and obviously indicate (inter)subjectivity.

Argomentare parlando e parlare argomentando: la polisemia della parola ‘argomento’ nella Divina Commedia

Towards Feasible Guidelines for the Annotation of Argument Schemes

by Elena Musi and Debanjan Ghosh

The annotation of argument schemes represents an important step for argumenta-tion mining. Genera... more The annotation of argument schemes represents an important step for argumenta-tion mining. General guidelines for the annotation of argument schemes, applicable to any topic, are still missing due to the lack of a suitable taxonomy in Argu-mentation Theory and the need for highly trained expert annotators. We present a set of guidelines for the annotation of argument schemes, taking as a framework the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Morasso, 2010; Rigotti, 2009). We show that this approach can contribute to solving the theoretical problems, since it offers a hierarchical and finite taxonomy of argument schemes as well as systematic, linguistically-informed criteria to distinguish various types of argument schemes. We describe a pilot annotation study of 30 persuasive essays using multiple minimally trained non-expert annotators .Our findings from the confusion matrixes pinpoint problematic parts of the guidelines and the underlying annotation of claims and premises. We conduct a second annotation with refined guidelines and trained annotators on the 10 essays which received the lowest agreement initially. A significant improvement of the inter-annotator agreement shows that the annotation of argument schemes requires highly trained annotators and an accurate annotation of argumentative components (premises and claims).

Strategies of objectification in opinion articles the case of evidentials

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil dr... more This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil drilling issues in USA. It will be shown through a multilevel annotation that evidentials, depending on their lexical semantics, indicate specific types of standpoints and premises as far as (inter)subjectivity and objectivity are concerned.

Evidential Modals at the Semantic- Argumentative Interface: Appearance Verbs as Indicators of Defeasible Argumentation

This contribution aims at providing an argumentative method to account for epistemic modality and... more

Verbs of appearance and argument schemes: Italian sembrare as an argumentative indicator

by Johanna Miecznikowski and Elena Musi

F. van Eemeren & B. Garssen (eds.), Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation Theory (pp. 259-278), 2015

This paper investigates the role of verbs of appearance as argumentative indicators analysing the... more This paper investigates the role of verbs of appearance as argumentative indicators analysing the uses of the Italian verb sembrare (‘to seem’) in a sample of 40 texts chosen from a corpus of reviews, editorials and comment posts. An analysis conducted within the framework of the Argumentum Model of Topics, shows that the verb, in its evidential-inferential uses, indicates specific argument schemes of the symptomatic as well as the causal type.

A Multi-layer Annotated Corpus of Argumentative Text: From Argument Schemes to Discourse Relations

Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum

Proceedings of the Argumentation Mining Workshop at EMNLP, 2017

Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumenta... more Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumentative structure that consists of argument components (e.g., claims, premises) and their argumentative relations (e.g., support, attack). Less emphasis has been placed on analyzing the semantic types of argument components. We propose a two-tiered annotation scheme to label claims and premises and their semantic types in an online persuasive forum, Change My View, with the long-term goal of understanding what makes a message persuasive. Premises are annotated with the three types of persuasive modes: ethos, logos, pathos, while claims are labeled as interpretation, evaluation , agreement, or disagreement, the latter two designed to account for the dialog-ical nature of our corpus. We aim to answer three questions: 1) can humans reliably annotate the semantic types of argument components? 2) are types of premises/claims positioned in recurrent orders? and 3) are certain types of claims and/or premises more likely to appear in persuasive messages than in non-persuasive messages?

Discovering Argumentative Patterns in Energy Polylogues: A Macroscope for Argument Mining

by Elena Musi and Mark Aakhus

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint ... more A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective (e.g., group, online community) manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argu-mentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereo-typical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope's design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices.

Tracing the roots of defeasibility in evaluative and interpretative standpoints: appearance verbs as argumentative indicators in opinion articles

Argumentation and Language—Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations. Springer, Cham., 2018

This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opin... more This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opinion articles, taking as a case study the Italian verb sembrare ('seem'). Appearance verbs, due to their lexical semantics and their modal-evidential functions are privileged candidates to indicate argument schemes. The linguistic literature has investigated the links between inferential evidentiality and epistemic modality, while it has devoted little attention to the links between the structure of the underlying inferences and degrees of defeasibility. Argumentation Theory has widely explored defeasible reasoning without making reference to the linguistic clues expressing and constraining the type of defeasibility at issue. Through a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation this study i) shows that appearance verbs work as indicators of defeasible reasoning, and ii) provides a systematic methodology to trace back the roots of defeasibility in the inferential configuration of arguments. As a theoretical outcome, the analysis reveals that there are no argument schemes or types of reasonings (abductive, deductive, inductive) more defeasible than others. The roots of defeasibility can be traced back only if the whole inferential configuration, strictly tied to the context, is reconstructed.

Analyzing the Semantic Types of Claims and Premises in an Online Persuasive Forum

by Elena Musi and Alyssa Hwang

Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumenta... more Argumentative text has been analyzed both theoretically and computationally in terms of argumentative structure that consists of argument components (e.g., claims, premises) and their argumentative relations (e.g., support, attack). Less emphasis has been placed on analyzing the semantic types of argument components. We propose a two-tiered annotation scheme to label claims and premises and their semantic types in an online persuasive forum, Change My View, with the long-term goal of understanding what makes a message persuasive. Premises are annotated with the three types of persuasive modes: ethos, logos, pathos, while claims are labeled as interpretation, evaluation , agreement, or disagreement, the latter two designed to account for the dialog-ical nature of our corpus. We aim to answer three questions: 1) can humans reliably annotate the semantic types of argument components? 2) are types of premises/claims positioned in recurrent orders? and 3) are certain types of claims and/or premises more likely to appear in persuasive messages than in non-persuasive messages?

A Multi-layer Annotated Corpus of Argumentative Text: From Argument Schemes to Discourse Relations

by Elena Musi and Andrea Rocci

We present a multi-layer annotated corpus of 112 argumentative microtexts encompassing not only a... more We present a multi-layer annotated corpus of 112 argumentative microtexts encompassing not only argument structure and discourse relations (Stede et al., 2016), but also argument schemes — the inferential relations linking premises to claims. We propose a set of guidelines for the annotation of argument schemes both for support and attack relations, and a new user-friendly annotation tool. The multi-layer annotated corpus allows us to conduct an initial study of dependencies between discourse relations (according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988)) and argument schemes. Our main contribution is that of offering the first resource for the combined study of (argumentative) discourse relations and inferential moves.

ChangeMyView Through Concessions: Do Concessions Increase Persuasion

In discourse studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increas... more In discourse studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increase persuasion. We aim to empirically test this hypothesis by calculating the distribution of argumentative concessions in persuasive vs. non-persuasive comments from the ChangeMyView subreddit. This constitutes a challenging task since concessions are not always part of an argument. Drawing from a theoretically-informed typology of concessions, we conduct an annotation task to label a set of polysemous lexical markers as introducing an argumentative concession or not and we observe their distribution in threads that achieved and did not achieve persuasion. For the annotation, we used both expert and novice annotators. With the ultimate goal of conducting the study on large datasets, we present a self-training method to automatically identify argumentative concessions using linguistically motivated features. We achieve a moderate F1 of 57.4% on the development set and 46.0% on the test set via the self-training method. These results are comparable to state of the art results on similar tasks of identifying explicit discourse connective types from the Penn Discourse Treebank. Our findings from the manual labeling and the classification experiments indicate that the type of argumentative concessions we investigated is almost equally likely to be used in winning and losing arguments from the ChangeMyView dataset. While this result seems to contradict theoretical assumptions, we provide some reasons for this discrepancy related to the ChangeMyView subreddit.

How did you change my view? A corpus-based study of concessions' argumentative role

In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change ... more In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments.

How did you change my view? A corpus-based study of concessions' argumentative role

In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change ... more In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments.

Evidently epistential adverbs are argumentative indicators: A corpus-based study

Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of argumen... more Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of arguments. However, a comprehensive lexicon of these linguistic devices is so far lacking due to the scarcity of corpora argumentatively annotated and the absence of an empirically validated analytic methodology. Recent studies have shown that modals, that express that things might be otherwise, and evidentials, that point to the presence of information sources, are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators. On these grounds, we propose a systematic, non-language specific corpus-based procedure to identify indicators of argumentative discourse relations. We test the design of a multi-level annotation through the analysis of the English and Italian epistential adverbs evidently and evidentemente in comparable corpora of newspaper articles. We show that the annotation guidelines achieve consistent analytical results with expert annotators. Data analysis reveals that the two adverbs work as argumentative indicator both at the structural and at the inferential level: besides pointing to the presence of premises-conclusion relations, they recurrently pattern with causal argument schemes from the effect to the cause. The Italian adverb evidentemente is less polysemous and more frequent, thus working as a more reliable indicator.

Building an ontology of (dis)agreement space for argument mining

by Elena Musi, Debanjan Ghosh, Mark Aakhus, and Nina Wacholder

Tanto varrebbe dirlo subito: indicatore di confutazione per analogia e per alternative

1. Introduzione Questo lavoro è dedicato all'analisi dell'espressione tanto varrebbe da un punto ... more 1. Introduzione Questo lavoro è dedicato all'analisi dell'espressione tanto varrebbe da un punto di vista semantico e argomentativo. 1 L'interesse per questa tematica d'analisi è sorto durante un incontro della scuola dottorale in Lingua, letteratura e civiltà italiana dell'Università della Svizzera italiana in una presentazione di Alberta Fasano, incentrata sulla tematica dell'ékphrasis nell'opera gaddiana. Tra i testi analizzati figurava l'articolo "Il cetriolo dei crivelli", pubblicato da Gadda sul quotidiano Il Giorno, scritto in occasione di una mostra sui crivelleschi a Venezia. Uno stralcio dell'articolo è qui di seguito riportato: (1) Curiosi la pera o mela di destra, e, più, il cetriolo pèndulo a sinistra: quel cetriolo ch'è un poco una idea fissa del grande pittore: una costante insistita della minuzia realistica d'un pittore di genere, come taluno ha ritenuto di poter dire: imagine ovunque sorda all'idea «frutto», all'idea «ghirlanda», all'idea «trono della Madonna ad altare», eppur zucchescamente significativa d'un'umile campestre offerta esornante l'altare, per un addobbo amorosamente recato dalla campagna padovana o comunque irrigua e solare: e serenamente, pacatamente zucchifera. Cucùrbite a pezzi, a novembre dicembre, nella delicata povertà delle minestre paesane, cetrioli di insalate estive, dono adeguato di poveri, d'infaticati ortolani, che inghirlandi a lato o sopra il fasto de' broccati e la preziosa lucidezza de' marmi lo schienale del trono della Madonna: e vi rechi i lumi gialli e dorati del settembre che matura colocinte, ossia zucche. Tanto varrebbe [chiamar «minuzie realistiche d'un pittore di genere» le rose e le vïole del leopardiano sabato]; o la gallina tornata in su la via.» [Gadda, Il cetriolo del Crivelli, pubblicato su Il Giorno, 24 ottobre 1961]

Genre norms and variation in online reviews: the dimension of information source

by Johanna Miecznikowski and Elena Musi

In: Pandolfi, E.M. et al., Studies on language norms in context. Duisburg Papers on research in language and culture (pp. 303-336), Jan 2017

Based on an Italian corpus of contributions to comment spaces of online reviews in different doma... more Based on an Italian corpus of contributions to comment spaces of online reviews in different domains, we argue that some of these contributions are user reviews. We show that users position themselves as legitimate contributors by conforming to genre conventions that are central in official reviews, in particular to the requirement that the reviewer must possess direct knowledge of the reviewed object. Other genre norms are not observed, thus adapting the genre to the context of comment spaces.

Strategies of objectification in opinion articles the case of ev

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil dr... more This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil drilling issues in USA. It will be shown through multilevel annotation that evidentials, depending on their lexical semantics, indicate specific types of standpoints and premises as far as (inter)subjectivity and objectivity are concerned.

Obviously Epistentials are Argumentative Indicators: Evidence from an Italian and English Corpus of Newspaper Articles

by Elena Musi and Andrea Rocci

Recent studies have shown that epistentials are good candidates to work as argumentative indicato... more Recent studies have shown that epistentials are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators, useful tool for argumentation mining. In this paper we investigate the argumentative properties of the Italian adverbs evidentemente and ovviamente and their English counterparts evidently and obviously in comparable corpora of opinion articles through a multilayer annotation. The results show that evidentemente and evidently presuppose the presence of premises-conclusion relations where premises are textually adjacent, while ovviamente and obviously indicate (inter)subjectivity.

Argomentare parlando e parlare argomentando: la polisemia della parola ‘argomento’ nella Divina Commedia

Towards Feasible Guidelines for the Annotation of Argument Schemes

by Elena Musi and Debanjan Ghosh

The annotation of argument schemes represents an important step for argumenta-tion mining. Genera... more The annotation of argument schemes represents an important step for argumenta-tion mining. General guidelines for the annotation of argument schemes, applicable to any topic, are still missing due to the lack of a suitable taxonomy in Argu-mentation Theory and the need for highly trained expert annotators. We present a set of guidelines for the annotation of argument schemes, taking as a framework the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Morasso, 2010; Rigotti, 2009). We show that this approach can contribute to solving the theoretical problems, since it offers a hierarchical and finite taxonomy of argument schemes as well as systematic, linguistically-informed criteria to distinguish various types of argument schemes. We describe a pilot annotation study of 30 persuasive essays using multiple minimally trained non-expert annotators .Our findings from the confusion matrixes pinpoint problematic parts of the guidelines and the underlying annotation of claims and premises. We conduct a second annotation with refined guidelines and trained annotators on the 10 essays which received the lowest agreement initially. A significant improvement of the inter-annotator agreement shows that the annotation of argument schemes requires highly trained annotators and an accurate annotation of argumentative components (premises and claims).

Strategies of objectification in opinion articles the case of evidentials

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil dr... more This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus of opinion articles about oil drilling issues in USA. It will be shown through a multilevel annotation that evidentials, depending on their lexical semantics, indicate specific types of standpoints and premises as far as (inter)subjectivity and objectivity are concerned.

Evidential Modals at the Semantic- Argumentative Interface: Appearance Verbs as Indicators of Defeasible Argumentation

This contribution aims at providing an argumentative method to account for epistemic modality and... more

Verbs of appearance and argument schemes: Italian sembrare as an argumentative indicator

by Johanna Miecznikowski and Elena Musi

F. van Eemeren & B. Garssen (eds.), Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation Theory (pp. 259-278), 2015

This paper investigates the role of verbs of appearance as argumentative indicators analysing the... more This paper investigates the role of verbs of appearance as argumentative indicators analysing the uses of the Italian verb sembrare (‘to seem’) in a sample of 40 texts chosen from a corpus of reviews, editorials and comment posts. An analysis conducted within the framework of the Argumentum Model of Topics, shows that the verb, in its evidential-inferential uses, indicates specific argument schemes of the symptomatic as well as the causal type.

Tracing the roots of defeasibility in evaluative and interpretative standpoints: appearance verbs as argumentative indicators in opinion articles

This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opin... more This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opinion articles, taking as a case study the Italian verb sembrare ('seem'). Appearance verbs, due to their lexical semantics and their modal-evidential functions are privileged candidates to indicate argument schemes. The linguistic literature has investigated the links between inferential evidentiality and epistemic modality, while it has devoted little attention to the links between the structure of the underlying inferences and degrees of defeasibility. Argumentation Theory has widely explored defeasible reasoning without making reference to the linguistic clues expressing and constraining the type of defeasibility at issue. Through a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation this study i) shows that appearance verbs work as indicators of defeasible reasoning, and ii) provides a systematic methodology to trace back the roots of defeasibility in the inferential configuration of arguments. As a theoretical outcome, the analysis reveals that there are no argument schemes or types of reasonings (abductive, deductive, inductive) more defeasible than others. The roots of defeasibility can be traced back only if the whole inferential configuration, strictly tied to the context, is reconstructed.