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This paper introduces a natural language understanding (NLU) framework for argumentative dialogue systems in the information-seeking and opinion building domain. The proposed framework consists of two sub-models, namely intent classifier and argument similarity. Intent classifier model stack BiLSTM with attention mechanism on top of pre-trained BERT model and fine-tune the model for recognizing the user intent, whereas argument similarity model employs BERT+BiLSTM for identifying system arguments the user refers to in his or her natural language utterances. Our model is evaluated in an argumentative dialogue system that engages the user to inform him-/herself about a controversial topic by exploring pro and con arguments and build his/her opinion towards the topic. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we collect user utterances for the interaction with the respective system labelling intent and referenced argument in an extensive online study. The data collection includes multiple topics and two different user types (native English speakers from the UK and non-native English speakers from China). Additionally, we evaluate the proposed intent classifier and argument similarity models separately on the publicly available Banking77 and STS benchmark datasets. The evaluation indicates a clear advantage of the utilized techniques over baseline approaches on several datasets, as well as the robustness of the proposed approach against new topics and different language proficiency as well as the cultural background of the user. Furthermore, results show that our intent classifier model outperforms DIET, DistillBERT, and BERT fine-tuned models in few-shot setups (i.e., with 10, 20, or 30 labelled examples per intent) and full data setup. • We propose natural language understanding framework for argumentative dialogue systems • We propose effective way of recognizing the user intent and identifying system arguments • We have employed pre-trained BERT model and BiLSTM for intent and argument detection • We collect user utterances for argumentation system in an extensive online study • The evaluation indicates advantage of the utilized techniques over baseline models [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]