Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection betweenpremise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such con-ventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation ofargumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-drivenperspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice isessential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quan-titatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true forargument scheme corpora, which tend to suffer from a combination of limited size,poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, wedescribe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Wal-ton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments.We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristicsof the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of thepreexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best ofour knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argu-mentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-anno-tator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotatingschemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure.
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