In assessing argument strength, the notions of what makes a good argument are manifold. With the broader trend towards treating subjectivity as an asset and not a problem in NLP, new dimensions of argument quality are studied. Although studies on individual subjective features like personal stories exist, there is a lack of large-scale analyses of the relation between these features and argument strength. To address this gap, we conduct regression analysis to quantify the impact of subjective factors – emotions, storytelling, and hedging - on two standard datasets annotated for objective argument quality and subjective persuasion. As such, our contribution is twofold: at the level of contributed resources, as there are no datasets annotated with all studied dimensions, this work compares and evaluates automated annotation methods for each subjective feature. At the level of novel insights, our regression analysis uncovers different patterns of impact of subjective features on the two facets of argument strength encoded in the datasets. Our results show that storytelling and hedging have contrasting effects on objective and subjective argument quality, while the influence of emotions depends on their rhetoric utilization rather than the domain.

Human moderators in online discussions face a heterogeneous range of tasks, which go beyond content moderation, or policing. They also support and improve discussion quality, which is challenging to model (and evaluate) in NLP due to its inherent subjectivity and the scarcity of annotated resources. We address this gap by introducing PerspectiveMod, a dataset of online comments annotated for the question: *“Does this comment require moderation, and why?”* Annotations were collected from both expert moderators and trained non-experts. **PerspectiveMod** is unique in its intentional variation across (a) the level of moderation experience embedded in the source data (professional vs. non-professional moderation environments), (b) the annotator profiles (experts vs. trained crowdworkers), and (c) the richness of each moderation judgment, both in terms on fine-grained comment properties (drawn from argumentation and deliberative theory) and in the representation of the individuality of the annotator (socio-demographics and attitudes towards the task). We advance understanding of the task’s complexity by providing interpretation layers that account for its subjectivity. Our statistical analysis highlights the value of collecting annotator perspectives, including their experiences, attitudes, and views on AI, as a foundation for developing more context-aware and interpretively robust moderation tools.

Moderation is essential for maintaining and improving the quality of online discussions. This involves: (1) countering negativity, e.g. hate speech and toxicity, and (2) promoting positive discourse, e.g. broadening the discussion to involve other users and perspectives. While significant efforts have focused on addressing negativity, driven by an urgency to address such issues, this left moderation promoting positive discourse (henceforth PositiveModeration) under-studied. With the recent advancements in LLMs, Positive Moderation can potentially be scaled to vast conversations, fostering more thoughtful discussions and bridging the increasing divide in online interactions.We advance the understanding of Positive Moderation by annotating a dataset on 13 moderation properties, e.g. neutrality, clarity and curiosity. We extract instructions from professional moderation guidelines and use them to prompt LLaMA to generate such moderation. This is followed by extensive evaluation showing that (1) annotators rate generated higher than professional moderation, but still slightly prefer professional moderation in pairwise comparison, and (2) LLMs can be used to estimate human evaluation as an efficient alternative.