Exploiting Personal Characteristics of Debaters for Predicting Persuasiveness

Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7067–7072 July 5 - 10, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics 7067 Exploiting Personal Characteristics of Debaters for Predicting Persuasiveness Khalid Al-Khatib1 Michael Völske1 Shahbaz Syed2 Nikolay Kolyada1 Benno Stein1 1 Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany, <first>.<last>@uni-weimar.de 2 Leipzig University, Germany, shahbaz.syed@uni-leipzig.de Abstract Predicting the persuasiveness of arguments has applications as diverse as writing assis- tance, essay scoring, and advertising. While clearly relevant to the task, the personal charac- teristics of an argument’s source and audience have not yet been fully exploited toward auto- mated persuasiveness prediction. In this paper, we model debaters’ prior beliefs, interests, and personality traits based on their previous activ- ity, without dependence on explicit user pro- files or questionnaires. Using a dataset of over 60,000 argumentative discussions, comprising more than three million individual posts col- lected from the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, we demonstrate that our modeling of debater’s characteristics enhances the prediction of argu- ment persuasiveness as well as of debaters’ re- sistance to persuasion. 1 Introduction Persuasion is a primary goal of argumentation (O’Keefe, 2006). It is often carried out in the form of a debate or discussion, where debaters argue to persuade others to take certain stances on contro- versial topics. Several studies have examined per- suasiveness in debates by probing the main factors for establishing persuasion, particularly regarding the role of linguistic features of debaters’ argu- ments (Zhang et al., 2016), the interaction between debaters (Tan et al., 2016), and the personal char- acteristics of debaters (Durmus and Cardie, 2018). While the impact of debaters’ characteristics on persuasiveness has been observed in online debates, the exploitation of these characteristics for predict- ing persuasiveness has been done based on explicit characteristics-related information in users’ pro- files or on questionnaires. For example, Lukin et al. (2017a) performed a personality trait test for selected people and asked them for their stances on specific topics to estimate their beliefs. Also, Durmus and Cardie (2018) used the information in users’ profiles in an online forum, where their stances on controversial topics are explicitly stated, as a proxy of their beliefs. Such a means of ex- ploitation limits the applicability of predicting per- suasiveness, as the characteristics of debaters are usually not explicitly available in online debates, and it is not practicable to survey every debater. The paper at hand studies how the character- istics of debaters can be modeled automatically and utilized successfully for predicting persuasive- ness. To this end, we propose a new approach of various features that capture the beliefs, interests, and personality traits of debaters on the subreddit “ChangeMyView” based on the debaters’ previous activity on the Reddit.com platform. We apply this approach to the tasks of predicting argument persuasiveness and predicting debater’s resistance to persuasion. Our experiments show that incorporating debater characteristics improves the prediction effectiveness of the two tasks over previous approaches which rely primarily on lin- guistic features. Interestingly, personality traits alone were the most predictive feature for resis- tance to …

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