Personalized Emphasis Framing for Persuasive Message Generation

Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1432–1441, Austin, Texas, November 1-5, 2016. c⃝2016 Association for Computational Linguistics Personalized Emphasis Framing for Persuasive Message Generation Tao Ding and Shimei Pan Department of Information Systems University of Maryland, Baltimore County {taoding01,shimei}@umbc.edu Abstract In this paper, we present a study on per- sonalized emphasis framing which can be used to tailor the content of a message to enhance its appeal to different individ- uals. With this framework, we directly model content selection decisions based on a set of psychologically-motivated domain- independent personal traits including person- ality (e.g., extraversion) and basic human values (e.g., self-transcendence). We also demonstrate how the analysis results can be used in automated personalized content selec- tion for persuasive message generation. 1 Introduction Persuasion is an integral part of our personal and professional lives. The topic of generating per- suasive messages has been investigated in different fields with varied focuses. Psychologists focus on the cognitive, social and emotional processes of a persuader and a persuadee to understand what makes a communication persuasive (Hovland et al., 1953; Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Smith and Petty, 1996). Marketing researchers are interested in applying the- ories of persuasion in promoting consumer products (Szybillo and Heslin, 1973; Han and Shavitt, 1994; Campbell and Kirmani, 2000; Kirmani and Camp- bell, 2004; Ford, 2005; Hirsh et al., 2012). Natural Language Generation (NLG) researchers are inter- ested in studying the relation between language us- age and persuasion in order to build automated sys- tems that produce persuasive messages (Guerini et al., 2011; Reiter et al., 2003). It is also generally believed that persuasion is more effective when it is custom-tailored to reflect the interests and concerns of the intended audience (Noar et al., 2007; Dijkstra, 2008; Hirsh et al., 2012). A proven tailoring tactic commonly used by politicians, marketing executives, as well as public health advocators is content framing (Meyerowitz and Chaiken, 1987; Maheswaran and Meyers-Levy, 1990; Grewal et al., 1994; Rothman and Salovey, 1997). Previous framing research has mainly fo- cused on two types of framing strategies: empha- sis framing and equivalence framing. To emphasis frame a message is to simplify reality by focusing on a subset of the aspects of a situation or an issue and make them more prominent in a communication to promote certain definition, causal interpretation and moral evaluation (Entman and Rojecki, 1993). For example, in political debating, the topic of nuclear energy can be framed as an economic development issue, a safety issue or an environmental issue. In marketing, the same car can be framed as a low cost car, a performance car, or a green car. With differ- ent framing strategies, the authors try to appeal to individuals with different beliefs and concerns. In contrast, equivalence framing focuses on presenting content as either loss-framed or gain-framed mes- sages. For example, a smoking cessation message can employ a gain-frame like “You will live longer if you quit smoking”, or a loss-frame such as “You will …

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