The ReCAP Corpus: A Corpus of Complex Argument Graphs on German Education Politics

The automatic extraction of arguments from natural language texts is a highly researched area and more important than ever today, as it is nearly impossible to manually capture all arguments on a controversial topic in a reasonable amount of time. For testing different algorithms such as the retrieval of the best arguments, which are still in their infancy, gold standards must exist. An argument consists of a claim or standpoint that is supported or opposed by at least one premise. The generic term for a claim or premise is Argumentative Discourse Unit (ADU). The relationships between ADUs can be specified by argument schemes and can lead to large graphs. This paper presents a corpus of 100 argument graphs with about 2,500 ADUs in German, which is unique in its size and the utilisation of argument schemes. The corpus is built from natural language texts like party press releases and parliamentary motions on education policies in the German federal states. Each high-quality text is presented by an argument graph and created by the use of a modified version of the annotation tool OVA. The final argument graphs resulted by merging two previously independently annotated graphs based on detailed discussions.