Unveiling argumentative communities through ad-populum argumentation schemes

This article introduces a method for detecting argumentative communities in semi-structured debates, which are supported by ad-populum argumentation schemes, as proposed by Walton. In these communities, opinions are characterized by their level of cohesion and the argumentative groups involved. In this context, we present a semi-structured argumentation formalism for analyzing social media debates and demonstrate how large language models can assist in instantiating the proposed formalism. We use conceptualizations, similarity and valued-based argumentation frameworks to assess argument cohesion and strength. Additionally, we model discursive interactions to analyze how stances influence one another and classify argumentative communities based on popular opinion argumentation schemes. We show that these communities can be modeled using such schemes, relying on public perception and consensus.