An argument-based decision support system for assessing natural language usage on the basis of the Web Corpus

The last decade bears witness to an exponential growth in the use of the World Wide Web. As a result, a huge number of documents are accessible online through search engines, whose pattern-matching capabilities have turned out to be useful for mining the Web space as a particular kind of linguistic corpus, commonly known as the Web Corpus. This article presents a novel, argumentative approach to providing proactive assistance for language usage assessment on the basis of usage indices, which are good indicators of the suitability of an expression on the basis of the Web Corpus. The user preferences consist of a number of (possibly defeasible) rules and facts that encode different aspects of adequate language usage, defining the acceptability of different terms on the basis of the computed usage indices. A defeasible argumentation system determines if a given expression is ultimately acceptable by analyzing a defeasible logic program that encodes the user's preferences. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.