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.
@cite_30: Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides a platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others to contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their original views. In this work, we study these interactions to understand the mechanisms behind persuasion. We find that persuasive arguments are characterized by interesting patterns of interaction dynamics, such as participant entry-order and degree of back-and-forth exchange. Furthermore, by comparing similar counterarguments to the same opinion, we show that language factors play an essential role. In particular, the interplay between the language of the opinion holder and that of the counterargument provides highly predictive cues of persuasiveness. Finally, since even in this favorable setting people may not be persuaded, we investigate the problem of determining whether someone's opinion is susceptible to being changed at all. For this more difficult task, we show that stylistic choices in how the opinion is expressed carry predictive power.
@cite_21: In this paper, we present a novel approach to model arguments, their components and relations in persuasive essays in English. We propose an annotation scheme that includes the annotation of claims and premises as well as support and attack relations for capturing the structure of argumentative discourse. We further conduct a manual annotation study with three annotators on 90 persuasive essays. The obtained inter-rater agreement of αU =0 .72 for argument components and α =0 .81 for argumentative relations indicates that the proposed annotation scheme successfully guides annotators to substantial agreement. The final corpus and the annotation guidelines are freely available to encourage future research in argument recognition.
@cite_3: 
@cite_57: Argument mining studies in natural language text often use lexical (e.g. n-grams) and syntactic (e.g. grammatical production rules) features with all possible values. In prior work on a corpus of academic essays, we demonstrated that such large and sparse feature spaces can cause difficulty for feature selection and proposed a method to design a more compact feature space. The proposed feature design is based on post-processing a topic model to extract argument and domain words. In this paper we investigate the generality of this approach, by applying our methodology to a new corpus of persuasive essays. Our experiments show that replacing n-grams and syntactic rules with features and constraints using extracted argument and domain words significantly improves argument mining performance for persuasive essays.
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@cite_63: We propose a new task in the field of computational argumentation in which we investigate qualitative properties of Web arguments, namely their convincingness. We cast the problem as relation classification, where a pair of arguments having the same stance to the same prompt is judged. We annotate a large datasets of 16k pairs of arguments over 32 topics and investigate whether the relation “A is more convincing than B” exhibits properties of total ordering; these findings are used as global constraints for cleaning the crowdsourced data. We propose two tasks: (1) predicting which argument from an argument pair is more convincing and (2) ranking all arguments to the topic based on their convincingness. We experiment with feature-rich SVM and bidirectional LSTM and obtain 0.76-0.78 accuracy and 0.35-0.40 Spearman’s correlation in a cross-topic evaluation. We release the newly created corpus UKPConvArg1 and the experimental software under open licenses.
@cite_16: 
@cite_25: Many social media platforms offer a mechanism for readers to react to comments, both positively and negatively, which in aggregate can be thought of as community endorsement. This paper addresses the problem of predicting community endorsement in online discussions, leveraging both the participant response structure and the text of the comment. The different types of features are integrated in a neural network that uses a novel architecture to learn latent modes of discussion structure that perform as well as deep neural networks but are more interpretable. In addition, the latent modes can be used to weight text features thereby improving prediction accuracy.
@cite_11: 
Previous work on belief change has primarily focused on single, experimentally crafted, persuasive messages, rather than exploring whether user-generated dialogic arguments can be repurposed to persuade. Recently however several papers have begun to investigate two challenges in argument mining: (1) understanding the structure of an argument and extracting argument components @cite_16 @cite_57 @cite_21 @cite_16 @cite_45 ; and (2) understanding what predicts the persuasiveness of web-sourced argumentative content @cite_63 @cite_25 @cite_3 @cite_11 @cite_30 .