@inproceedings{weber-etal-2026-says,
    title = "Says Who? Argument Convincingness and Reader Stance Are Correlated with Perceived Author Personality",
    author = "Weber, Sabine  and
      Greschner, Lynn  and
      Klinger, Roman",
    editor = "Barnes, Jeremy  and
      Barriere, Valentin  and
      De Clercq, Orph{\'e}e  and
      Klinger, Roman  and
      Nouri, C{\'e}lia  and
      Nozza, Debora  and
      Singh, Pranaydeep",
    booktitle = "The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis ({WASSA} 2026)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.wassa-1.20/",
    pages = "265--277",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-378-4",
    abstract = "Alongside its literal meaning, text also carries implicit social signals: information that is used by the reader to assign the author of the text a specific identity or make assumptions about the author{'}s character. The reader creates a mental image of the author which influences the interpretation of the presented information. This is especially relevant for argumentative text, where the credibility of the information might depend on who provides it. We therefore focus on the question: How do readers of an argument imagine its author? Using the ContArgA corpus, we study arguments annotated for convincingness and perceived author properties (level of education and Big Five personality traits). We find that annotators perceive an author to be similar to themselves when they agree with the stance of the argument. We also find that the envisioned personality traits and education level of the author are statistically significantly correlated with the argument{'}s convincingness. We conduct experiments with four generative LLMs and a RoBERTa-based regression model showing that LLMs do not replicate the annotators judgments. Argument convincingness can however provide a useful signal for modeling perceived author personality when it is explicitly used during training."
}