Swiss4Arg: A Parallel Dataset for Multilingual Argument Mining across Swiss National Languages

Abstract:We present Swiss4Arg, a multilingual dataset for argument mining based on official Swiss voting brochures, covering all four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh (a Romance minority language exclusively spoken in Switzerland). The brochures contain explicitly formulated arguments systematically organized into pro and con sections, resulting in a cross-lingually aligned resource with balanced argumentative stance. We create a dataset that comprises 53 federal voting issues collected between 2019 and 2025, annotated for argument components (major claims, claims, premises, and non-argumentative units) and relations (support and attack) by three native speakers per language. Inter-annotator agreement (Krippendorff's alpha) reaches 0.548 for component classification and 0.623 for relation and target classification, computed jointly across all annotators on the parallel data. We release both adjudicated labels and individual annotator annotations, enabling analyses of disagreement and cross-linguistic variation, and provide baseline results using GPT-5.4 and SwissBERT. Swiss4Arg establishes a novel benchmark for multilingual argument mining, with a particular focus on cross-lingual comparability and low-resource settings such as Romansh. The dataset and code are publicly available at this https URL (HuggingFace) and this https URL (GitHub).

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.17894 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.17894v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.17894 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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