A School Student Essay Corpus for Analyzing Interactions of
  Argumentative Structure and Quality
Maja Stahl Nadine Michel Sebastian Kilsbach Julian Schmidtke Sara Rezat Henning Wachsmuth
Learning argumentative writing is challenging. Besides writing fundamentals
such as syntax and grammar, learners must select and arrange argument
components meaningfully to create high-quality essays. To support argumentative
writing computationally, one step is to mine the argumentative structure. When
combined with automatic essay scoring, interactions of the argumentative
structure and quality scores can be exploited for comprehensive writing
support. Although studies have shown the usefulness of using information about
the argumentative structure for essay scoring, no argument mining corpus with
ground-truth essay quality annotations has been published yet. Moreover, none
of the existing corpora contain essays written by school students specifically.
To fill this research gap, we present a German corpus of 1,320 essays from
school students of two age groups. Each essay has been manually annotated for
argumentative structure and quality on multiple levels of granularity. We
propose baseline approaches to argument mining and essay scoring, and we
analyze interactions between both tasks, thereby laying the ground for
quality-oriented argumentative writing support.