ComArg — Corpus of Online User Comments with Arguments

Version: 1.0
Release date: June 26, 2014

1 Description

ComArg is a dataset of online user comments manually annotated with comment-argument pairs. The dataset is created for the argument recognition task: identifying what arguments, from a predefined set of arguments, have been used in users’ comments, and how. The task and the dataset are described in:

If you use the ComArg dataset for your own work, please cite the above paper. The BibTeX citation is:

@InProceedings{boltuzic2014back,
  author    = {Boltu\v{z}i\'{c}, Filip  and  \v{S}najder, Jan},
  title     = {Back up your Stance: Recognizing Arguments in Online Discussions},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2014},
  address   = {Baltimore, Maryland},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {49--58},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W14-2107}
}

2 Dataset

The dataset is available from here: comarg.v1.tar.gz. The archive contains two files:

GM.xml
UGIP.xml

The files contain comments from two on-line discussions, Gay Marriages (GM) and Under God in pledge (UGIP), containing 1285 and 1013 comment-argument pairs, respectively, each classified into one of five classes (see paper for details). The format is as follows:

<unit id="...">
	<comment>
		<text>...</text>
		<stance>...</stance>
	</comment>
	<argument>
		<text>...</text>
		<stance>...</stance>
	</argument>
	<label>...</label>
</unit>

3 License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.