Argumentation is the process by which humans rationally elaborate their thoughts and opinions in written (e.g., essays) or spoken (e.g., debates) contexts. Argument Mining research, however, has been focused on either written argumentation or spoken argumentation but without considering any additional information, e.g., speech acts and intentions. In this paper, we present an overview of DialAM-2024, the first shared task in dialogical argument mining, where argumentative relations and speech illocutions are modelled together in a unified framework. The task was divided into two different sub-tasks: the identification of propositional relations and the identification of illocutionary relations. Six different teams explored different methodologies to leverage both sources of information to reconstruct argument maps containing the locutions uttered in the speeches and the argumentative propositions implicit in them. The best performing team achieved an F1-score of 67.05% in the overall evaluation of the reconstruction of complete argument maps, considering both sub-tasks included in the DialAM-2024 shared task.

The dearth of literature combining hypothesis-making and collaborative problem solving presents a problem in the investigation into how hypotheses are generated in group environments. A new dataset, the Resolving Investigative hyPotheses (RIP) corpus, is introduced to address this issue. The corpus uses the fictionalised environment of a murder investigation game. An artificial environment restricts the number of possible hypotheses compared to real-world situations, allowing a deeper dive into the data. In three groups of three, participants collaborated to solve the mystery: two groups came to the wrong conclusion in different ways, and one succeeded in solving the game. RIP is a 49k-word dialogical corpus, consisting of three sub-corpora, annotated for argumentation and discourse structure on the basis of Inference Anchoring Theory. The corpus shows the emergent roles individuals took on and the strategies the groups employed, showing what can be gained through a deeper exploration of this domain. The corpus bridges the gap between these two areas – hypothesis generation and collaborative problem solving – by using an environment rich with potential for hypothesising within a highly collaborative space.

For a highly subjective task such as recognising speaker intention and argumentation, the traditional way of generating gold standards is to aggregate a number of labels into a single one. However, this seriously neglects the underlying richness that characterises discourse and argumentation and is also, in some cases, straightforwardly impossible. In this paper, we present QT30nonaggr, the first corpus of non-aggregated argument annotation, which will be openly available upon publication. QT30nonaggr encompasses 10% of QT30, the largest corpus of dialogical argumentation and analysed broadcast political debate currently available with 30 episodes of BBC’s ‘Question Time’ from 2020 and 2021. Based on a systematic and detailed investigation of annotation judgements across all steps of the annotation process, we structure the disagreement space with a taxonomy of the types of label disagreements in argument annotation, identifying the categories of annotation errors, fuzziness and ambiguity.