Open-Mindedness and Style Coordination in Argumentative Discussions

Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1876–1886 April 19 - 23, 2021. ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 1876 Open-Mindedness and Style Coordination in Argumentative Discussions Aviv Ben Haim Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering Ben-Gurion University avivbenh@post.bgu.ac.il Oren Tsur Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering Ben-Gurion University orentsur@bgu.ac.il Abstract Linguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vo- cabulary, and other aspects of language ac- cording to the communication style of one an- other. Previous research has shown how lin- guistic accommodation correlates with gaps in the power and status of the speakers and the way it promotes approval and discussion effi- ciency. In this work, we provide a novel per- spective on the phenomena, exploring its corre- lation with the open-mindedness of a speaker, rather than to her social status. We process thousands of unstructured argumentative dis- cussions that took place in Reddit’s Change My View (CMV) subreddit, demonstrating that open-mindedness relates to the assumed role of a speaker in different contexts. On the discussion level, we surprisingly find that dis- cussions that reach agreement present lower levels of accommodation. 1 Introduction 1.1 Linguistic Accommodation Accommodation in personal communication refers to the unconscious process in which a speaker changes (accommodates) her communicative be- havior with respect to the communication partner. The change can be manifested across many dimen- sions, e.g., posture (Condon and Ogston, 1967), nodding (Hale and Burgoon, 1984), pauses (Jaffe and Feldstein, 1970), and linguistic style (Nieder- hoffer and Pennebaker, 2002). From the per- spective of sociolinguistic and social-psychology, accommodation is argued to increase cognitive efficiency (Street and Giles, 1982), provide ap- proval and validation (Giles, 2008), and project the speaker’s positive image (Infante et al., 1997). In this work we focus on the accommodation of the linguistic style – the usage of stylistic markers and function words, such as auxiliary verbs and prepositions. Tausczik and Pennebaker (2010) es- timated that style and function words make up for 55% of the words we use. These markers shape the conversation regardless of its topical content. Anal- ysis of function-word usage is common in many NLP tasks, e.g., gender detection (Koppel et al., 2002; Mukherjee and Liu, 2010; Bortolato, 2016), forensic linguistics (Juola, 2008; Boukhaled and Ganascia, 2015; Kestemont, 2014) and personality type detection (Argamon et al., 2005, 2009; Litvi- nova et al., 2016), among others. Accommodation is not necessarily a symmetric process. One party in a communication can ac- commodate while the other party can either accom- modate as well (converge), sustain her behavior, or actively diverge. Linguistic style accommoda- tion was first studied quantitatively by Niederhof- fer and Pennebaker (2002), analyzing the linguis- tic style accommodation in a small scale dataset. Large scale datasets and advanced statistical and algorithmic methods were explored by Danescu- Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2011); Guo et al. (2015); Muir et al. (2017), among others. Differences in the social status of the speakers were found to dom- inate …

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