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Deliberative, argumentative discourse is an important component of opinion formation, belief revision, and knowledge discovery; it is a cornerstone of modern civil society. Argumentation is productively studied in branches ranging from theoretical artificial intelligence to political rhetoric, but empirical analysis has suffered from a lack of freely available, unscripted argumentative dialogs. This paper presents the Internet Argument Corpus (IAC), a set of 390, 704 posts in 11, 800 discussions extracted from the online debate site 4forums.com. A 2866 thread/130, 206 post extract of the corpus has been manually sided for topic of discussion, and subsets of this topic-labeled extract have been annotated for several dialogic and argumentative markers: degrees of agreement with a previous post, cordiality, audiencedirection, combativeness, assertiveness, emotionality of argumentation, and sarcasm. As an application of this resource, the paper closes with a discussion of the relationship between discourse marker pragmatics, agreement, emotionality, and sarcasm in the IAC corpus.
Walker et al. (2012) studied this question.