The VisArgue project was an interdisciplinary collaboration of political science, linguistics and information science at the University of Konstanz (principal investigators: Prof. Miriam Butt, PhD, Prof. Dr. Katharina Holzinger and Prof. Dr. Daniel Keim), funded by the eHumanities initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from 2012 to 2016. Its main goal was the development of an automated measurement tool for the quality of deliberative communication in political discourse. 

In the project we used an innovative combination of methods from different areas of research, including

• a theoretical tenet of deliberative communication originating from political science,
• an automatic and linguistically-motivated annotation of discourse patterns relevant in deliberative communication
• a shallow, statistical analysis of the discourse to detect common patterns in negotiations and
• the development and employment of visualization tools to identify patterns of communication at-a-glance

For more details on the techniques and results, see our publications. 

For a demo version of the system go to http://visargue.inf.uni-konstanz.de.

We were also part of the CLARIN-D network and will contribute the insights and resources of our project to increase the availability of speech and language technologies for the German language.