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Title: Exploring the Role of Prior Beliefs for Argument Persuasion
Public debate forums provide a common platform for exchanging opinions on a topic of interest. While recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have provided empirical evidence that the language of the debaters and their patterns of interaction play a key role in changing the mind of a reader, research in psychology has shown that prior beliefs can affect our interpretation of an argument and could therefore constitute a competing alternative explanation for resistance to changing one’s stance. To study the actual effect of language use vs. prior beliefs on persuasion, we provide a new dataset and propose a controlled setting that takes into consideration two reader-level factors: political and religious ideology. We find that prior beliefs affected by these reader-level factors play a more important role than language use effects and argue that it is important to account for them in NLP studies of persuasion.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1741441
PAR ID:
10075229
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Volume:
1 (Long papers)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1035 - 1045
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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