The development of computing technology for natural language has followed a hierarchical structure familiar to linguists. Early work at Bell Laboratories focused on phonology, recognizing and generating the basic sounds. Then researchers began to detect words and discern their relation in sentences, the domains of morphology and syntax.

The next level is discourse, that is, understanding how individual sentences form larger coherent structures such as narratives, expositions, law codes, and recipes. Expository language is frequently organized into statements that support or challenge one another. Researchers have recently been developing mechanisms for recognizing and extracting these argumentative structures. This volume is a survey of recent research in this area.

Chapter 1 defines argumentation and argument mining and describes the potential value of such technology. Chapter 2 summarizes basic linguistic concepts that are useful in discussing argumentation. Chapter 3 surveys the wide range of abstract models of argument that linguists have proposed, including classical syllogisms, Toulmin structures, and issue-based information system (IBIS) schemes. Developing schemes for the automated extraction of arguments requires bodies of text that have been manually annotated for use in training and testing computational methods, and chapter 4 discusses these.

After these preliminaries, the next three chapters survey recent research in three components of argument mining: finding the claims that a document makes (chapter 5), identifying statements that either support or object to those claims (chapter 6), and assembling these components into an overall structure (chapter 7).

Argument mining technology can be used either to retrieve arguments from existing text or to generate new argumentative text, and chapters 8 and 9 review these areas of application. Chapter 10 offers a summary.

The book includes an integrated index and a bibliography of more than 300 items published through 2018. It is an excellent survey of a new and rapidly growing field of computational linguistics that will be a useful guide to the literature for new researchers.