Corpus Resources for Dispute Mediation Discourse

Corpus Resources for Dispute Mediation Discourse Mathilde Janier1, Chris Reed1 1Centre for Argument Technology (ARG-tech) University of Dundee, Scotland m.janier@dundee.ac.uk, c.a.reed@dundee.ac.uk Abstract Dispute mediation is a growing activity in the resolution of conflicts, and more and more research emerge to enhance and better understand this (until recently) understudied practice. Corpus analyses are necessary to study discourse in this context; yet, little data is available, mainly because of its confidentiality principle. After proposing hints and avenues to acquire transcripts of mediation sessions, this paper presents the Dispute Mediation Corpus, which gathers annotated excerpts of mediation dialogues. Although developed as part of a project on argumentation, it is freely available and the text data can be used by anyone. This first-ever open corpus of mediation interactions can be of interest to scholars studying discourse, but also conflict resolution, argumentation, linguistics, communication, etc. We advocate for using and extending this resource that may be valuable to a large variety of domains of research, particularly those striving to enhance the study of the rapidly growing activity of dispute mediation. Keywords: discourse, dispute mediation, open corpus 1. Introduction Mediation is a rapidly growing practice among dispute res- olution processes. The high costs and delays of traditional litigation lead people to prefer alternative dispute resolu- tion (ADR) processes, and dispute mediation is becoming extremely popular, particularly in English-speaking coun- tries1. In different domains of research – such as sociol- ogy, linguistics or argumentation – an increasing number of academic publications focus on a better understanding of this growing practice and are therefore concerned with discourse in dispute mediation (see e.g. (Greco Morasso, 2011; Greatbatch and Dingwall, 1997; Tanaka et al., 2007; Stokoe, 2012; Hoffer, 1996), etc.). Academics, however, have difficulties in acquiring data to study discourse in me- diation, in particular because of its confidentiality principle. This lack of resources is a challenge that leads us to advo- cate for an open corpus of mediation transcripts that would be valuable to research communities who strive to better understand this activity and try to make it more effective and more efficient. Such a corpus would be useful for di- verse areas of research : conflict resolution, argumentation, linguistics, sociology, etc. It would allow for sharing tran- scripts of dialogues in this understudied context, and sev- eral different works of research would be made possible by building upon them. It will then be possible to compare, develop and expand previous studies. That, will ultimately lead to an extended knowledge of this growing domain. Several corpora have been created to boost research in lin- guistics2. They all are designed for different purposes and contain different data. For example, the Brown Univer- sity Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English (or Brown corpus) (Kucera and Winthrop, 1967)3, one of the 1As an example, National Family Mediation, one of the largest mediation service in England and Wales conducted 16,000 medi- ations in 2012/2013 2Footnotes after the references that follow give the number of works that cite these publications, according to Google Scholar. …

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