Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion
Stephanie Lukin, Pranav Anand, Marilyn Walker, Steve Whittaker
Abstract
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.- Anthology ID:
- E17-1070
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Valencia, Spain
- Editors:
- Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 742–753
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/E17-1070
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Stephanie Lukin, Pranav Anand, Marilyn Walker, and Steve Whittaker. 2017. Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 742–753, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion (Lukin et al., EACL 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/E17-1070.pdf