Persuasiveness of News Editorials depending on Ideology and Personality

Roxanne El Baff, Khalid Al Khatib, Benno Stein, Henning Wachsmuth

Abstract
News editorials aim to shape the opinions of their readership and the general public on timely controversial issues. The impact of an editorial on the reader’s opinion does not only depend on its content and style, but also on the reader’s profile. Previous work has studied the effect of editorial style depending on general political ideologies (liberals vs.conservatives). In our work, we dig deeper into the persuasiveness of both content and style, exploring the role of the intensity of an ideology (lean vs.extreme) and the reader’s personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness). Concretely, we train content- and style-based models on New York Times editorials for different ideology- and personality-specific groups. Our results suggest that particularly readers with extreme ideology and non “role model” personalities are impacted by style. We further analyze the importance of various text features with respect to the editorials’ impact, the readers’ profile, and the editorials’ geographical scope.
Anthology ID:
2020.peoples-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
PEOPLES
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29–40
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.peoples-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Roxanne El Baff, Khalid Al Khatib, Benno Stein, and Henning Wachsmuth. 2020. Persuasiveness of News Editorials depending on Ideology and Personality. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media, pages 29–40, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Persuasiveness of News Editorials depending on Ideology and Personality (El Baff et al., PEOPLES 2020)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/2020.peoples-1.4.pdf
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