The Role of Pragmatic and Discourse Context in Determining Argument Impact

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 5668–5678, Hong Kong, China, November 3–7, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 5668 The Role of Pragmatic and Discourse Context in Determining Argument Impact Esin Durmus Cornell University ed459@cornell.edu Faisal Ladhak Amazon faisall@amazon.com Claire Cardie Cornell University cardie@cs.cornell.edu Abstract Research in the social sciences and psy- chology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the lan- guage employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of the argument’s claims given the pragmatic and discourse con- text of the argument. Among these charac- teristics of persuasive arguments, prior work in NLP does not explicitly investigate the ef- fect of the pragmatic and discourse context when determining argument quality. This pa- per presents a new dataset to initiate the study of this aspect of argumentation: it consists of a diverse collection of arguments covering 741 controversial topics and comprising over 47,000 claims. We further propose predic- tive models that incorporate the pragmatic and discourse context of argumentative claims and show that they outperform models that rely only on claim-specific linguistic features for predicting the perceived impact of individual claims within a particular line of argument. 1 Introduction Previous work in the social sciences and psychol- ogy has shown that the impact and persuasive power of an argument depends not only on the lan- guage employed, but also on the credibility and character of the communicator (i.e. ethos) (Miller et al., 1976; Chaiken, 1979, 1980); the traits and prior beliefs of the audience (G. Lord et al., 1979; Davies, 1998; Correll et al., 2004; Hullett, 2005); and the pragmatic context in which the argument is presented (i.e. kairos) (Haugtvedt and Wegener, 1994; Joyce and Harwood, 2014). Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has only partially corroborated these find- ings. One very influential line of work, for ex- ample, develops computational methods to auto- matically determine the linguistic characteristics of persuasive arguments (Habernal and Gurevych, 2016; Tan et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2016), but it does so without controlling for the audience, the communicator or the pragmatic context. Very recent work, on the other hand, shows that attributes of both the audience and the communi- cator constitute important cues for determining ar- gument strength (Lukin et al., 2017; Durmus and Cardie, 2018). They further show that audience and communicator attributes can influence the rel- ative importance of linguistic features for predict- ing the persuasiveness of an argument. These re- sults confirm previous findings in the social sci- ences that show a person’s perception of an argu- ment can be influenced by his background and per- sonality traits. To the best of our knowledge, however, no NLP studies explicitly investigate the role of kairos — a component of pragmatic context that refers to the context-dependent “timeliness” and “appropriate- ness” of an argument and its claims within an ar- gumentative discourse …

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