Winning on the Merits: The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes

Lu Wang, Nick Beauchamp, Sarah Shugars, Kechen Qin


Abstract
Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which side has the stronger arguments. We propose a predictive model of debate that estimates the effects of linguistic features and the latent persuasive strengths of different topics, as well as the interactions between the two. Using a dataset of 118 Oxford-style debates, our model’s combination of content (as latent topics) and style (as linguistic features) allows us to predict audience-adjudicated winners with 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming linguistic features alone (66%). Our model finds that winning sides employ stronger arguments, and allows us to identify the linguistic features associated with strong or weak arguments.
Anthology ID:
Q17-1016
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 5
Month:
Year:
2017
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Kristina Toutanova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
219–232
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q17-1016
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00057
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lu Wang, Nick Beauchamp, Sarah Shugars, and Kechen Qin. 2017. Winning on the Merits: The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 5:219–232.
Cite (Informal):
Winning on the Merits: The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes (Wang et al., TACL 2017)
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 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-bitext-workshop/Q17-1016.mp4