Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others. We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.

Informal first-person narratives are a unique resource for computational models of everyday events and people’s affective reactions to them. People blogging about their day tend not to explicitly say I am happy. Instead they describe situations from which other humans can readily infer their affective reactions. However current sentiment dictionaries are missing much of the information needed to make similar inferences. We build on recent work that models affect in terms of lexical predicate functions and affect on the predicate’s arguments. We present a method to learn proxies for these functions from first-person narratives. We construct a novel fine-grained test set, and show that the patterns we learn improve our ability to predict first-person affective reactions to everyday events, from a Stanford sentiment baseline of .67F to .75F.

Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self-Determination theory posits that the basis for well-being rests on our assessments of our competence, autonomy and social connection. And surveys that measure happiness empirically note that people require their basic needs to be met for food and shelter, but beyond that tend to be happiest when socializing, eating or having sex. We analyze a corpus of private micro-blogs from a well-being application called Echo, where users label each written post about daily events with a happiness score between 1 and 9. Our goal is to ground the linguistic descriptions of events that users experience in theories of well-being and happiness, and then examine the extent to which different theoretical accounts can explain the variance in the happiness scores. We show that recurrent event types, such as obligation and incompetence, which affect people’s feelings of well-being are not captured in current lexical or semantic resources.

Many genres of natural language text are narratively structured, a testament to our predilection for organizing our experiences as narratives. There is broad consensus that understanding a narrative requires identifying and tracking the goals and desires of the characters and their narrative outcomes. However, to date, there has been limited work on computational models for this problem. We introduce a new dataset, DesireDB, which includes gold-standard labels for identifying statements of desire, textual evidence for desire fulfillment, and annotations for whether the stated desire is fulfilled given the evidence in the narrative context. We report experiments on tracking desire fulfillment using different methods, and show that LSTM Skip-Thought model achieves F-measure of 0.7 on our corpus.

Large scale corpora have benefited many areas of research in natural language processing, but until recently, resources for dialogue have lagged behind. Now, with the emergence of large scale social media websites incorporating a threaded dialogue structure, content feedback, and self-annotation (such as stance labeling), there are valuable new corpora available to researchers. In previous work, we released the INTERNET ARGUMENT CORPUS, one of the first larger scale resources available for opinion sharing dialogue. We now release the INTERNET ARGUMENT CORPUS 2.0 (IAC 2.0) in the hope that others will find it as useful as we have. The IAC 2.0 provides more data than IAC 1.0 and organizes it using an extensible, repurposable SQL schema. The database structure in conjunction with the associated code facilitates querying from and combining multiple dialogically structured data sources. The IAC 2.0 schema provides support for forum posts, quotations, markup (bold, italic, etc), and various annotations, including Stanford CoreNLP annotations. We demonstrate the generalizablity of the schema by providing code to import the ConVote corpus.

Deliberative, argumentative discourse is an important component of opinion formation, belief revision, and knowledge discovery; it is a cornerstone of modern civil society. Argumentation is productively studied in branches ranging from theoretical artificial intelligence to political rhetoric, but empirical analysis has suffered from a lack of freely available, unscripted argumentative dialogs. This paper presents the Internet Argument Corpus (IAC), a set of 390,704 posts in 11,800 discussions extracted from the online debate site 4forums.com. A 2866 thread/130,206 post extract of the corpus has been manually sided for topic of discussion, and subsets of this topic-labeled extract have been annotated for several dialogic and argumentative markers: degrees of agreement with a previous post, cordiality, audience-direction, combativeness, assertiveness, emotionality of argumentation, and sarcasm. As an application of this resource, the paper closes with a discussion of the relationship between discourse marker pragmatics, agreement, emotionality, and sarcasm in the IAC corpus.