Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation
Roxanne El Baff, Henning Wachsmuth, Khalid Al Khatib, Benno Stein
Abstract
News editorials argue about political issues in order to challenge or reinforce the stance of readers with different ideologies. Previous research has investigated such persuasive effects for argumentative content. In contrast, this paper studies how important the style of news editorials is to achieve persuasion. To this end, we first compare content- and style-oriented classifiers on editorials from the liberal NYTimes with ideology-specific effect annotations. We find that conservative readers are resistant to NYTimes style, but on liberals, style even has more impact than content. Focusing on liberals, we then cluster the leads, bodies, and endings of editorials, in order to learn about writing style patterns of effective argumentation.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.287
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3154–3160
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.287
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.287
- Cite (ACL):
- Roxanne El Baff, Henning Wachsmuth, Khalid Al Khatib, and Benno Stein. 2020. Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3154–3160, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation (El Baff et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.acl-main.287.pdf