Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?

Abstract

Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in personal values are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.

HyEnA: A Hybrid Method for Extracting Arguments from Opinions

“…Future efforts could focus on addressing diversity, either by mining for minority opinions directly (Waterschoot et al, 2022), or by identifying possibly subjective instances using socio-demographic information (Beck et al, 2023). Further, models can be enhanced with subjective understanding (Romberg, 2022;van der Meer et al, 2023), or work together with humans to jointly address some of the diversity issues Argyle et al, 2023).…”