Touché: First Shared Task on Argument Retrieval

Technologies for argument mining and argumentation processing are maturing continuously, giving rise to the idea of retrieving arguments in search scenarios. We introduce Touche, the first lab on Argument Retrieval featuring two subtasks: (1) the retrieval of arguments from a focused debate collection to support argumentative conversations, and (2) the retrieval of arguments from a generic web crawl to answer comparative questions with argumentative results. The goal of this lab is to perform an evaluation of various strategies to retrieve argumentative information from the web content. In this paper, we describe the setting of each subtask: the motivation, the data, and the evaluation methodology.