@inproceedings{gajewska-etal-2026-ethos,
    title = "How Ethos and Pathos Appeals Resonate in Reader Interpretations of Social Media Messages",
    author = "Gajewska, Ewelina  and
      Budzynska, Katarzyna  and
      Chudziak, Jaros{\l}aw A.  and
      Allein, Liesbeth",
    editor = "Choi, Jinho D.  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung  and
      Funakoshi, Kotaro  and
      Emami, Ali",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = aug,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Atlanta, Georgia, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/cawl-year/2026.sigdial-1.23/",
    pages = "327--341",
    abstract = "Rhetorical strategies and their influence on audiences are often studied through social media posts and comments. However, this focus overlooks the ``universal audience'', which is the majority of readers who remain silent and do not explicitly express how a message affects them. This study investigates how two classical modes of persuasion, ethos and pathos, resonate in the silent audience{'}s interpretations of meaning. Using a dataset of social media sentences paired with human-written interpretations, we label both sources for ethos and pathos and assess whether these rhetorical appeals are preserved. Our analyses show that interpretations diverge from the original sentences in 30{\%} of cases, with rhetorically charged content eliciting greater variability than neutral content. We further find that ethos and pathos in original sentences can predict audience attitudes toward the author, underscoring the subtle ways rhetoric shapes perception beyond visible engagement."
}