Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation

Abstract

News editorials argue about political issues in order to challenge or reinforce the stance of readers with different ideologies. Previous research has investigated such persuasive effects for argumentative content. In contrast, this paper studies how important the style of news editorials is to achieve persuasion. To this end, we first compare content-and style-oriented classifiers 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 liberals, we then cluster the leads, bodies, and endings of editorials, in order to learn about writing style patterns of effective argumentation.

Overview of SMP-CAIL2020-Argmine: The Interactive Argument-Pair Extraction in Judgement Document Challenge

“…al. [32] compare content-and style-oriented classifiers on editorials from the liberal NYTimes with ideology-specific effect annotations to explore the effect of writing style of editorials to audience of different parties; Ji et al [6] propose the task of identifying interactive argument pairs in online debate forum such as ChangeMyView (CMV), along with a novel representation learning method called Discrete Variational Encoder (DVAE) to encode different dimension of information brought by the arguments in the corpus; Cheng et. al.…”

Intrinsic Quality Assessment of Arguments

“…Several corpora and approaches were proposed for specific argument quality dimensions, first related to essay scoring (Persing and Ng, 2015), some of which modeling arguments explicitly (Wachsmuth et al, 2016). Later approaches targeted arguments from debate portals (Wei et al, 2016), student essays (Stab and Gurevych, 2017), mixed web texts (Wachsmuth et al, 2017c), and news editorials (Yang et al, 2019;El Baff et al, 2020). We use the corpus of Wachsmuth et al (2017b), as it is the only one annotated for diverse dimensions and is claimed to reflect argument quality comprehensively.…”

Fact vs. Opinion: the Role of Argumentation Features in News Classification

“…Editorials across different publishers consist of a majority of assumptions (claims), while they employ evidence supporting strategies differently. This corpus has been used to analyze persuasion in editorials (El Baff et al, 2020), and to study patterns of argumentative strategies across topics (Al Khatib et al, 2017). We hypothesize that predicting argumentative strategies of newspaper articles is also useful in predicting the overall type of the article to be news or opinion.…”