Corpus Resources for Dispute Mediation Discourse

Dispute mediation is a growing activity in the resolution of conflicts, and more and more research emerge to enhance and better understand this (until recently) understudied practice. Corpus analyses are necessary to study discourse in this context; yet, little data is available, mainly because of its confidentiality principle. After proposing hints and avenues to acquire transcripts of mediation sessions, this paper presents the Dispute Mediation Corpus, which gathers annotated excerpts of mediation dialogues. Although developed as part of a project on argumentation, it is freely available and the text data can be used by anyone. This first-ever open corpus of mediation interactions can be of interest to scholars studying discourse, but also conflict resolution, argumentation, linguistics, communication, etc. We advocate for using and extending this resource that may be valuable to a large variety of domains of research, particularly those striving to enhance the study of the rapidly growing activity of dispute mediation.