Modelling Persuasion through Misuse of Rhetorical Appeals

Amalie Pauli, Leon Derczynski, Ira Assent


Abstract
It is important to understand how people use words to persuade each other. This helps understand debate, and detect persuasive narratives in regard to e.g. misinformation. While computational modelling of some aspects of persuasion has received some attention, a way to unify and describe the overall phenomenon of when persuasion becomes undesired and problematic, is missing. In this paper, we attempt to address this by proposing a taxonomy of computational persuasion. Drawing upon existing research and resources, this paper shows how to re-frame and re-organise current work into a coherent framework targeting the misuse of rhetorical appeals. As a study to validate these re-framings, we then train and evaluate models of persuasion adapted to our taxonomy. Our results show an application of our taxonomy, and we are able to detecting misuse of rhetorical appeals, finding that these are more often used in misinformative contexts than in true ones.
Anthology ID:
2022.nlp4pi-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
89–100
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4pi-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amalie Pauli, Leon Derczynski, and Ira Assent. 2022. Modelling Persuasion through Misuse of Rhetorical Appeals. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 89–100, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modelling Persuasion through Misuse of Rhetorical Appeals (Pauli et al., NLP4PI 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2022.nlp4pi-1.11.pdf