Argumentation and Domain Discourse in Scholarly Articles on the Theory of International Relations

Magdalena Wolska, Sassan Gholiagha, Mitja Sienknecht, Dora Kiesel, Irene Lopez Garcia, Patrick Riehmann, Matti Wiegmann, Bernd Froehlich, Katrin Girgensohn, Jürgen Neyer, Benno Stein


Abstract
We present the first dataset, an annotation scheme, discourse analysis, and baseline experiments on argumentation and domain content types in scholarly articles on political science, specifically on the theory of International Relations (IR). The dataset comprises over 1 600 sentences stemming from three foundational articles on Neo-Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. We show that our annotation scheme enables educationally-relevant insight into the scholarly IR discourse and that state-of-the-art classifiers, while effective in distinguishing basic argumentative elements (Claims and Support/Attack relations) reaching up to 0.97 micro F1 , require domain-specific training and fine-tuning on the more fine-grained tasks of relation and content type prediction.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.621
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
9238–9249
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.621/
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Cite (ACL):
Magdalena Wolska, Sassan Gholiagha, Mitja Sienknecht, Dora Kiesel, Irene Lopez Garcia, Patrick Riehmann, Matti Wiegmann, Bernd Froehlich, Katrin Girgensohn, Jürgen Neyer, and Benno Stein. 2025. Argumentation and Domain Discourse in Scholarly Articles on the Theory of International Relations. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9238–9249, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Argumentation and Domain Discourse in Scholarly Articles on the Theory of International Relations (Wolska et al., COLING 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.621.pdf