A support framework for argumentative discussions management in the web

Abstract

On the Web, wiki-like platforms allow users to provide arguments in favor or against issues proposed by other users. The increasing content of these platforms as well as the high number of revisions of the content through pros and cons arguments make it difficult for community managers to understand and manage these discussions. In this paper, we propose an automatic framework to support the management of argumentative discussions in wiki-like platforms. Our framework is composed by (i) a natural language module, which automatically detects the arguments in natural language returning the relations among them, and (ii) an argumentation module, which provides the overall view of the argumentative discussion under the form of a directed graph highlighting the accepted arguments. Experiments on the history of Wikipedia show the feasibility of our approach. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.