Abstract
This paper examines the factors that govern persuasion for a priori UNDECIDED versus DECIDED audience members in the context of on-line debates. We separately study two types of influences: linguistic factors — features of the language of the debate itself; and audience factors — features of an audience member encoding demographic information, prior beliefs, and debate platform behavior. In a study of users of a popular debate platform, we find first that different combinations of linguistic features are critical for predicting persuasion outcomes for UNDECIDED versus DECIDED members of the audience. We additionally find that audience factors have more influence on predicting the side (PRO/CON) that persuaded UNDECIDED users than for DECIDED users that flip their stance to the opposing side. Our results emphasize the importance of considering the undecided and decided audiences separately when studying linguistic factors of persuasion.- Anthology ID:
- W19-4519
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Argument Mining
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Editors:
- Benno Stein, Henning Wachsmuth
- Venue:
- ArgMining
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 167–176
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-4519
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-4519
- Cite (ACL):
- Liane Longpre, Esin Durmus, and Claire Cardie. 2019. Persuasion of the Undecided: Language vs. the Listener. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Argument Mining, pages 167–176, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Persuasion of the Undecided: Language vs. the Listener (Longpre et al., ArgMining 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/W19-4519.pdf