IDENTIFYING JUSTIFICATIONS IN WRITTEN DIALOGS BY CLASSIFYING TEXT AS ARGUMENTATIVE

Abstract

In written dialog, discourse participants need to justify claims they make, to convince the reader the claim is true and/or relevant to the discourse. This paper presents a new task (with an associated corpus), namely detecting such justifications. We investigate the nature of such justifications, and observe that the justifications themselves often contain discourse structure. We therefore develop a method to detect the existence of certain types of discourse relations, which helps us classify whether a segment is a justification or not. Our task is novel, and our work is novel in that it uses a large set of connectives (which we call indicators), and in that it uses a large set of discourse relations, without choosing among them.