Searching, Navigating, and Querying Arguments and Debates: Tools, Languages, and Methodologies

Recent developments in Web technologies have transformed Web users from passive consumers to active creators of digital content. As users see the Web as a means to enable dialogical exchange, debating, and commenting on products, services or events, a significant portion of web content is of argumentative form. This content can be unstructured, e.g., free-text, or (semi-)structured, both at the debate level, e.g., through a reply structure, and/or at the argument level, e.g., by requiring a specific argument format. The plethora of arguments online is useful only with the support of appropriate tools for identifying relevant arguments for any given information need. Depending on the form of the debate, the context, and the application at hand, this identification could require capabilities for simple keyword-based searching, navigational or explorational capabilities, the ability to perform analytical queries, as well as the ability to perform more complex searches and queries that involve the arguments’ (or debates’) structure and interrelationships. In this article, we provide a short survey of various tools and languages for searching, exploring and querying arguments, aiming to highlight the main advances in this area.