Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation

Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3154–3160 July 5 - 10, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics 3154 Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation Roxanne El Baff 1,2 Henning Wachsmuth 3 Khalid Al-Khatib 2 Benno Stein 2 1 German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany, roxanne.elbaff@dlr.de 2 Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Weimar, Germany, <first>.<last>@uni-weimar.de 3 Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany, henningw@upb.de Abstract News editorials argue about political issues in order to challenge or reinforce the stance of readers with different ideologies. Previous re- search has investigated such persuasive effects for argumentative content. In contrast, this pa- per studies how important the style of news edi- torials is to achieve persuasion. To this end, we first compare content- and style-oriented clas- sifiers on editorials from the liberal NYTimes with ideology-specific effect annotations. We find that conservative readers are resistant to NYTimes style, but on liberals, style even has more impact than content. Focusing on liber- als, we then cluster the leads, bodies, and end- ings of editorials, in order to learn about writ- ing style patterns of effective argumentation. 1 Introduction The interaction between the author and the intended reader of an argumentative text is encoded in the linguistic choices of the author and their persuasive effect on the reader (Halmari and Virtanen, 2005). News editorials, in particular, aim to challenge or to reinforce the stance of readers towards controver- sial political issues, depending on the readers’ ide- ology (El Baff et al., 2018). To affect readers, they often start with an enticing lead paragraph and end their argument with a “punch” (Rich, 2015). Existing research has studied the persuasive ef- fect of argumentative content and structure (Zhang et al., 2016; Wachsmuth et al., 2016) or combi- nations of content and style (Wang et al., 2017; Persing and Ng, 2017). In addition, some works indicate that different types of content affect read- ers with different personalities (Lukin et al., 2017) and beliefs (Durmus and Cardie, 2018). However, it remains unexplored so far what stylistic choices in argumentation actually affect which readers. We expect such choices to be key to generating effec- tive argumentation (Wachsmuth et al., 2018). This paper analyzes the persuasive effect of style in news editorial argumentation on readers with dif- ferent political ideologies (conservative vs. liberal). We model style with widely-used features captur- ing argumentativeness (Somasundaran et al., 2007), psychological meaning (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010), and similar (Section 3). Based on the NY- Times editorial corpus of El Baff et al. (2018) with ideology-specific effect annotations (Section 4), we compare style-oriented with content-oriented clas- sifiers for persuasive effect (Section 5).1 While the general performance of effect predic- tion seems somewhat limited on the corpus, our experiments yield important results: Conservative readers seem largely unaffected by the style of the (liberal) NYTimes, matching the intuition that con- tent is what dominates opposing ideologies. On the other hand, the style features predict the persuasive effect on liberal readers even better than the content features …

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