Investigating Reasoning with Hypotheses: The RIP2 Corpus
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)
Abstract
Analyses of hypothesis generation in fictionalised environments have significant potential for exploring factors influencing reasoning and decision-making in naturalistic contexts. Based on transcripts of 16 groups playing a murder mystery game, with a total of 42 human participants, RIP2 is a 177,000 word corpus exemplifying reasoning in the forensic domain. With a 80,000 word representative sample of the corpus annotated using an argumentation framework, RIP2 is nearly twice the size of the RIP Corpus of Collaborative Hypothesis-Making (RIP1), currently the only existing corpus of hypothesis-making in group environments. With an new experimental set-up and guidelines for annotating both cases of hypothesising and conjecturing, RIP2 offers insight into how participants generate, maintain, and reject hypotheses, as well as how they interact with others’ contributions. Based on its close exploration of six groups (three successful), this corpus particularly allows for group-level comparisons of factors influencing group success. Within this paper, we discuss the main contributions for understanding hypothesising and collaborative reasoning, and offer use cases for extended work demonstrating how analysis of hypothesis generation can be used for future research on argumentation quality and decision-making.