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<Paper uid="W99-0303">
  <Title>Argumentation Mark-Up: A Proposal</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="18" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Computational linguistics has had a long interest in discourse representation, but generally on the structure of monologue or dialogue rather than on content analysis, rhetoric, or argumentation proper. There is an increasing amount of work on mark-up, that is, indicating locally in the text the linguistic information - rather than in some knowledge-representation formalism. Mark-up can be designed for the reader, for a browser (in charge of displaying the information according to some template), or for further processing (a summarizer, a semantic analyzer, a reasoning system) - or a combination of these.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 1.1. Reading aids Active reading involves a task of text mapping, selecting, anchoring and short-term memorization, all the more taxing when reading a scarcely-formatted text. Speed reading techniques (Judson &amp; Schaill 73) address in fact not only speed per se, but also efficient information extraction and critiquing. (Note: I am much in favour of giving speed reading more recognition -- and I even practice it live in a live radio program on literature, to quickly select passages.). More people have to read more text, and often this cannot be done in integral reading mode (cf. the idea, in Carver 90, of &amp;quot;gear shifts&amp;quot; between six reading modes). Highlighting helps reading, as seen in common experience (also see numerous references in Ostler 98). With a rich and appropriate annotation, the reader has a better idea of what is important in some given respect, and retention is better. Then, it may well be useful to 1) develop a powerful reader-oriented annotation system, and 2) implement automatic highlighting or interactive assisted annotation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Those heavy readers can be helped more appropriately by summaries, highlighting, hypertext, etc. All try to facilitate access and use, by helping selective perception and interpretation. One should allow at least multiple views of a text. There is a qualitative difference of the finesse of understanding if one can manipulate text, or access essential information (Cremmins 82, Jewinsky 90), possibly an order of magnitude faster. Those points were addressed in a May 1999 colloquium organized by this author (Delannoy 99).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 1.2. Processing, modularity, and interchange Corpus annotation has largely addressed text structure and categorial tagging, but until very recently has been leaving out most linguistic annotation: lexical (word-sense disambiguation), syntactic, sentence semantic, passage semantics. A mark-up standard would facilitate modular processing and interchange among teams working on argumentation.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="18" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.3 Other work on argumentation
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> There does not seem to be focused work on argumentation annotation, as distinguished from dialogue structures.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Moulin 95 uses speech acts, but does not discuss argumentation structure and validity.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The Global Document Annotation initiative (GDA), a small-team Japanese-German effort to develop a wide set of tags; it treats argumentation marginally, with half a dozen causality relations: cause, reason, motivation, purpose, concession, contrast .... This is rather similar, in fact, to Fillmore-inspired verbal cases, as those used in the clause-level analysis part of Barker et al. 98b.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) will soon be broadening its scope, so far mostly concerned with text structure, but has not circulated concrete proposals yet on discourse.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> The encoding schemes DR/and Mate do not consider the question.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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