Exploring Morality in Argumentation

Sentiment and stance are two important concepts for the analysis of arguments. We propose to add another perspective to the analysis, namely moral sentiment. We argue that moral values are crucial for ideological debates and can thus add useful information for argument mining. In the paper, we present different models for automatically predicting moral sentiment in debates and evaluate them on a manually annotated test set. We then apply our models to investigate how moral values in arguments relate to argument quality, stance, and audience reactions.