  We investigate the problem of sentence-level supporting argument detection
from relevant documents for user-specified claims. A dataset containing claims
and associated citation articles is collected from online debate website
idebate.org. We then manually label sentence-level supporting arguments from
the documents along with their types as study, factual, opinion, or reasoning.
We further characterize arguments of different types, and explore whether
leveraging type information can facilitate the supporting arguments detection
task. Experimental results show that LambdaMART (Burges, 2010) ranker that uses
features informed by argument types yields better performance than the same
ranker trained without type information.
