Fallacies play a prominent role in argumentation since antiquity due to their contribution to argumentation in critical thinking education. They are defined as "derailments of strategic manoeuvring", meaning speech acts that violate the rules of a rational argumentative discussion for assumed persuasive gains. These derailments are particularly significant in political discourse, and the role of fallacies is becoming even more crucial nowadays as contemporary argumentation technologies face challenging tasks as misleading and manipulative information detection in news articles and political discourse, and counter-narrative generation. In this talk, I will discuss some solutions to identify automatically fallacious arguments in political debates, focusing on the prominent role of knowledge and reasoning in this challenging task.
1. Abstract