SKILL-IR-Discourse: A Large, Annotated Corpus of Argumentation and Domain Discourse on International Relations

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


Abstract
We present a large annotated corpus of scholarly discourse in the domain of International Relations, a subfield of political science. The corpus comprises 190 articles (over 1500K tokens) annotated at the argumentation, basic rhetorical, and domain level. Five of the included articles (ca. 62K tokens) constitute a Gold-standard, coded by domain experts. The remaining articles were coded by annotators trained on the Gold-standard and monitored for annotation quality. We describe our corpus creation methodology, the annotation process and quality assurance, the corpus itself, and present insights into the data: Most argumentative structures in the data are simple premise-conclusion structures, fewer than half of the claims have explicit supporting evidence. Counter-arguments to claims are rare. The claim-to-support ratio varies widely between articles; possibly to some extent due to the topics covered (with clear common ground) or to the differences between authors’ styles. The distribution of theoretical vs. evaluative statements varies strongly between articles; this can be attributed to such factors as different methodological approaches between the articles and the methodological focus of the publishing journal.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.513
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6472–6482
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-513
DOI:
10.63317/4i2ptc5x4ese
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Magdalena Wolska, Matti Wiegmann, Sassan Gholiagha, Mitja Sienknecht, Dora Kiesel, Irene Lopez Garcia, Patrick Riehmann, Bernd Fröhlich, Katrin Girgensohn, Jürgen Neyer, and Benno Stein. 2026. SKILL-IR-Discourse: A Large, Annotated Corpus of Argumentation and Domain Discourse on International Relations. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6472–6482, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
SKILL-IR-Discourse: A Large, Annotated Corpus of Argumentation and Domain Discourse on International Relations (Wolska et al., LREC 2026)
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