Unveiling the Power of Argument Arrangement in Online Persuasive Discussions

Nailia Mirzakhmedova, Johannes Kiesel, Khalid Al-Khatib, Benno Stein

Abstract
Previous research on argumentation in online discussions has largely focused on examining individual comments and neglected the interactive nature of discussions. In line with previous work, we represent individual comments as sequences of semantic argumentative unit types. However, because it is intuitively necessary for dialogical argumentation to address the opposing viewpoints, we extend this model by clustering type sequences into different argument arrangement patterns and representing discussions as sequences of these patterns. These sequences of patterns are a symbolic representation of argumentation strategies that capture the overall structure of discussions. Using this novel approach, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the strategies in 34,393 discussions from the online discussion forum Change My View and show that our discussion model is effective for persuasiveness prediction, outperforming LLM-based classifiers on the same data. Our results provide valuable insights into argumentation dynamics in online discussions and, through the presented prediction procedure, are of practical importance for writing assistance and persuasive text generation systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1048
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15659–15671
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2023.findings-emnlp.1048/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1048
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nailia Mirzakhmedova, Johannes Kiesel, Khalid Al-Khatib, and Benno Stein. 2023. Unveiling the Power of Argument Arrangement in Online Persuasive Discussions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15659–15671, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unveiling the Power of Argument Arrangement in Online Persuasive Discussions (Mirzakhmedova et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2023.findings-emnlp.1048.pdf
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