Analyzing Persuasion Strategies of Debaters on Social Media

Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6897–6905 October 12–17, 2022. 6897 Analyzing Persuasion Strategies of Debaters on Social Media Matti Wiegmann1∗ Khalid Al-Khatib2∗ Vishal Khanna1 Benno Stein1 1 Bauhaus-Universität Weimar <first>.<last>@uni-weimar.de 2 University of Groningen khalid.alkhatib@rug.nl Abstract Existing studies on the analysis of persuasion in online discussions focus on investigating the effectiveness of comments in discussions and ignore the analysis of the effectiveness of de- baters over multiple discussions. In this paper, we propose to quantify debaters’ effectiveness in the online discussion platform: “Change- MyView” in order to explore diverse insights into their persuasion strategies. In particular, targeting debaters with different levels of ef- fectiveness (e.g., good vs. poor), various be- havioral characteristics (e.g., engagement), and text stylistic features (e.g., used frames) of de- baters are carefully examined, leading to sev- eral outcomes that can be the backbone of writ- ing assistants and persuasive text generation. 1 Introduction Persuasion, a primary goal of argumentation, is the ability to convince people to do a certain ac- tion or form a particular belief (O’Keefe, 2006). Persuasion has always influenced the dynamics of communication and social interactions, either pos- itively by raising awareness on critical issues like climate change or negatively by influencing the behavior of voters in elections or disseminating propaganda and fake news. Social media, through its growing role in the formation of beliefs, has gained notable interest as a means to gather a deeper understanding of per- suasion (Wang et al., 2021). The ChangeMyView (CMV) subreddit in particular has been used in var- ious studies that model text persuasiveness using a variety of linguistic, argumentative, and behav- ioral features (e.g., (Hidey and McKeown, 2018), (Longpre et al., 2019), and (Guo et al., 2020)). However, scholarly work on online persuasion centers around studying persuasive comments in individual discussions without considering the im- portance of analyzing persuasive debaters (Luu ∗ Equal contribution et al., 2019). Hence, debater strategies and their effectiveness have not been adequately studied. Un- derstanding effective debating strategies and de- bater persuasiveness can be highly beneficial for media analysis, rhetorical review, and for learning debating skills. Besides, it can advance the de- velopment of several applications, where effective strategies can be recommended in writing assis- tants and dialog management systems or encoded in the backbone of text generation tools. This paper focuses on analyzing the debaters’ persuasion strategies, seeking to uncover the behav- ior, language style, and argumentative techniques that distinguish good from poor debaters. To do so, we categorize CMV debaters based on their effec- tiveness in persuasion and examine key differences in their behaviors and skills (i.e., engagement and experience), as well as their argument’s style (at the semantic, syntactical, lexical, and pragmatic lev- els). We propose the task of identifying effective debaters and present an approach to tackle it. Our analysis of debater strategies yields several insights. For example, we find that the effective- ness of persuasion improves over time for aver- age debaters, the distribution of ‘frames’ in the debaters’ arguments …

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