Quality of argumentation in political tweets

what is and how to measure it

Abstract

Argumentation is something inherent to human beings and essential to written and spoken communication. Because of the popularization of Internet access, social media are one of the main means of creation and profusion of argumentative texts in various fields, such as politics. As a way to contribute to research related to the assessment of the quality of argumentation in Portuguese, we aim in this paper to propose and validate criteria and guidelines for the assessment of the quality of argumentation in Twitter posts in the domain of politics. For this purpose, a corpus was produced and annotated with tweets whose content is related to the Brazilian political scenario. The texts were collected in the first months of 2021, resulting in 1,649,674 posts. From the analysis of a sample, we defined linguistic criteria that would potentially characterize relevant aspects of the rhetorical dimension of argumentation, namely: (i) Clarity, (ii) Arrangement, (iii) Credibility, and (iv) Emotional appeal. After this phase of analysis, we proposed the annotation of a new set of 400 tweets, by four annotators. As a result, an agreement of around 70% for three out of four annotators was obtained. It is worth noting that this is the first work that proposes linguistic criteria for the evaluation of the quality of argumentation in social medias for Brazilian Portuguese. It is intended to construct a computer model that can automatically evaluate the quality of argumentation in social media messages, such as Twitter, based on the establishment of linguistic criteria, annotation rules, and annotated corpus.