On Complex Argumentation Structures in Tweets

Using a corpus of all tweets issued by German members of parliament in a recent 6-year period, we study the formal complexity of the argumentation found in tweet pairs, where the second is a reply to the first. Our complexity measures are based on the number of argumentative units and the relations among them. We suggest a method for identifying potentially complex argumentation and then manually annotating a set of tweet pairs for their argument structure. Despite the length limit of tweets, we find that politicians indeed perform rather elaborate arguments and that the structures require amendments to an annotation scheme that has previously been used in similar corpus projects, though on more traditional types of texts.