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MAD: A Corpus of Multilingual Argumentative Deliberation

Summary

Nearly all manually annotated argument data is in English, and the few non-English resources are separate collections. Their topics, speakers and annotation procedures differ, so they cannot be compared directly. The authors close this gap with MAD, a small corpus of spoken deliberation. The same groups of people argue about the same kind of task in more than one language. Four groups of fluent L2 English speakers each solved two versions of the NASA Survival Scenario ranking task: one in their mother tongue (German, Italian or Polish) and one in English. The task was adapted to remove assigned roles and to encourage joint ranking from the start. All eight dialogues were annotated with Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT), which records both argument relations and the dialogue acts that anchor them. Inter-annotator agreement was moderate. Because the argumentation is spontaneous rather than translated, MAD supports research on second-language effects, cross-linguistic comparison of argument, and how consistent individual speakers are across languages. It also serves as evaluation data for argument mining and for LLM reasoning.

Key points

  • The corpus has 8 dialogues from 4 groups (three pairs and one trio). Two groups are German-speaking, one Italian and one Polish, and each group also held one dialogue in English. In total there are 15,051 words.
  • It contains 1,149 argument relations (482 inference, 173 conflict, 494 rephrase) and 3,635 illocutionary connections.
  • Annotation agreement is Cohen's κ = 0.449, which counts as moderate.
  • The two task variants are the Moon crash-landing scenario and a Jamestown 1607 colony scenario.
  • Annotations use the AIF+ format and are hosted on AIFdb (corpora.aifdb.org/mad). The raw transcripts are released on GitHub (emaguire/multiling-arg-delib).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3z4jk3uj7pfe

@inproceedings{maguire2026mad,
  title = {{MAD: A Corpus of Multilingual Argumentative Deliberation}},
  author = {Maguire, Eimear and Schad, Ella and Visser, Jacky and Reed, Chris and Lawrence, John},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3z4jk3uj7pfe},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3z4jk3uj7pfe}
}

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