@inproceedings{falk-lapesa-2023-storyarg,
    title = "{S}tory{ARG}: a corpus of narratives and personal experiences in argumentative texts",
    author = "Falk, Neele  and
      Lapesa, Gabriella",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.132",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.132",
    pages = "2350--2372",
    abstract = "Humans are storytellers, even in communication scenarios which are assumed to be more rationality-oriented, such as argumentation. Indeed, supporting arguments with narratives or personal experiences (henceforth, stories) is a very natural thing to do {--} and yet, this phenomenon is largely unexplored in computational argumentation. Which role do stories play in an argument? Do they make the argument more effective? What are their narrative properties? To address these questions, we collected and annotated StoryARG, a dataset sampled from well-established corpora in computational argumentation (ChangeMyView and RegulationRoom), and the Social Sciences (Europolis), as well as comments to New York Times articles. StoryARG contains 2451 textual spans annotated at two levels. At the argumentative level, we annotate the function of the story (e.g., clarification, disclosure of harm, search for a solution, establishing speaker{'}s authority), as well as its impact on the effectiveness of the argument and its emotional load. At the level of narrative properties, we annotate whether the story has a plot-like development, is factual or hypothetical, and who the protagonist is. What makes a story effective in an argument? Our analysis of the annotations in StoryARG uncover a positive impact on effectiveness for stories which illustrate a solution to a problem, and in general, annotator-specific preferences that we investigate with regression analysis.",
}

Humans are storytellers, even in communication scenarios which are assumed to be more rationality-oriented, such as argumentation. Indeed, supporting arguments with narratives or personal experiences (henceforth, stories) is a very natural thing to do {--} and yet, this phenomenon is largely unexplored in computational argumentation. Which role do stories play in an argument? Do they make the argument more effective? What are their narrative properties? To address these questions, we collected and annotated StoryARG, a dataset sampled from well-established corpora in computational argumentation (ChangeMyView and RegulationRoom), and the Social Sciences (Europolis), as well as comments to New York Times articles. StoryARG contains 2451 textual spans annotated at two levels. At the argumentative level, we annotate the function of the story (e.g., clarification, disclosure of harm, search for a solution, establishing speaker{'}s authority), as well as its impact on the effectiveness of the argument and its emotional load. At the level of narrative properties, we annotate whether the story has a plot-like development, is factual or hypothetical, and who the protagonist is. What makes a story effective in an argument? Our analysis of the annotations in StoryARG uncover a positive impact on effectiveness for stories which illustrate a solution to a problem, and in general, annotator-specific preferences that we investigate with regression analysis.
Falk, Neele Lapesa, Gabriella
StoryARG: a corpus of narratives and personal experiences in argumentative texts