On the role of discourse markers for discriminating claims and premises in argumentative discourse

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the role of discourse markers in argumentative discourse. We annotated a German corpus with arguments according to the common claim-premise model of argumentation and performed various statistical analyses regarding the discriminative nature of discourse markers for claims and premises. Our experiments show that particular semantic groups of discourse markers are indicative of either claims or premises and constitute highly predictive features for discriminating between them.