A Corpus for Argumentative Writing Support in German

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 856–869 Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 8-13, 2020 856 A Corpus for Argumentative Writing Support in German Thiemo Wambsganss1, Christina Niklaus1, 3, Matthias S¨ollner2, Siegfried Handschuh1, 3 and Jan Marco Leimeister1, 2 1 University of St.Gallen {thiemo.wambsganss, christina.niklaus, siegfried.handschuh, janmarco.leimeister}@unisg.ch 2 University of Kassel {soellner, leimeister}@uni-kassel.de 3 University of Passau {christina.niklaus, siegfried.handschuh}@uni-passau.de Abstract In this paper, we present a novel annotation approach to capture claims and premises of argu- ments and their relations in student-written persuasive peer reviews on business models in Ger- man language. We propose an annotation scheme based on annotation guidelines that allows to model claims and premises as well as support and attack relations for capturing the structure of argumentative discourse in student-written peer reviews. We conduct an annotation study with three annotators on 50 persuasive essays to evaluate our annotation scheme. The obtained inter- rater agreement of α = 0.57 for argument components and α = 0.49 for argumentative relations indicates that the proposed annotation scheme successfully guides annotators to moderate agree- ment. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 1,000 persuasive student-written peer reviews on business models and our annotation guidelines to encourage future research on the design and development of argumentative writing support systems for students. 1 Introduction In today’s world most information is readily available. Consequently, the sole reproduction of informa- tion is losing attention. This results in a shift of job profiles towards interdisciplinary, ambiguous and creative tasks (vom Brocke et al., 2018). Therefore, educational institutions need to evolve in their curric- ula when it comes to the compositions of skills and knowledge conveyed. In particular, teaching higher order thinking skills to students, such as critical thinking, collaboration or problem-solving, has become more important (Fadel et al., 2015). This has already been recognized by the Organization for Eco- nomic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which included these skills as a major element of their Learning Framework 2030 (OECD, 2018). One subclass represents the skill of arguing in a structured, reflective and well-formed way. Argumentation is not only an essential part of our daily communication and thinking, but it also contributes significantly to the competencies of communication, collaboration and problem-solving (Kuhn, 1992). Building on studies by Aristotle, the ability to form convincing ar- guments is recognized as the foundation for persuading an audience of novel ideas, and it plays a major role in strategic decision-making and analyzing different standpoints. To develop skills such as argu- mentation, it is of great importance for the individual student to receive continuous feedback throughout their learning journey, also called formative feedback (Black and Wiliam, 2009; Hattie and Timperley, 2007). However, this is naturally hindered due to traditional large-scale lectures and due to the growing field of distance learning scenarios such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Seaman et al., 2018). In fact, educational institutions, such as universities, face the challenge of providing individual formative feedback effectively (Fortes and Tchantchane, 2010), since every student would need a personal …

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