Is This Post Persuasive? Ranking Argumentative Comments in Online Forum

Abstract

In this paper we study how to identify persuasive posts in the online forum discussions, using data from Change My View sub-Reddit. Our analysis confirms that the users' voting score for a comment is highly correlated with its metadata information such as published time and author reputation. In this work, we propose and evaluate other features to rank comments for their persuasive scores, including textual information in the comments and social interaction related features. Our experiments show that the surface textual features do not perform well compared to the argumentation based features, and the social interaction based features are effective especially when more users participate in the discussion.

Computational Argumentation Quality Assessment in Natural Language

“…Also, we omit approaches that classify argumentation schemes (Feng and Hirst, 2011), evidence types (Rinott et al, 2015), ethosrelated statements (Duthie et al, 2016), and myside bias ; their output may help assess quality assessment, but they do not actually assess it. The same holds for argument mining, Level of support Braunstain et al (2016) Evidence Rahimi et al (2014) Sufficiency Stab and Gurevych (2017) Thesis clarity Persing and Ng (2013) Prompt adherence Persing and Ng (2014) Global coherence Feng et al (2014) Evaluability Park et al (2015) Acceptability Cabrio and Villata (2012) Organization Persing et al (2010), Rahimi et al (2015) Argument strength Persing et al (2015) Persuasiveness Tan et al (2016), Wei et al (2016) Winning side Zhang et al (2016) Convincingness Habernal et al (2016) Prominence Boltužic and Šnajder (2015) Relevance Wachsmuth et al (2017) Figure 1: The proposed taxonomy of argumentation quality as well as the mapping of existing assessment approaches to the covered quality dimensions. Arrows show main dependencies between the dimensions.…”

Argumentation Quality Assessment: Theory vs. Practice

“…Persing and Ng (2015) annotated the argumentative strength of essays composing multiple arguments with notable agreement. For single arguments, however, all existing approaches that we are aware of assess quality in relative terms, e.g., Cabrio and Villata (2012) find accepted arguments based on attack relations, Wei et al (2016) rank arguments by their persuasiveness, and Wachsmuth et al (2017b) rank them by their relevance. Boudry et al (2015) argue that normative concepts such as fallacies rarely apply to real-life arguments and that they are too sophisticated for operationalization.…”

What Changed Your Mind: The Roles of Dynamic Topics and Discourse in Argumentation Process

“…As a fast growing sub-field of computational argumentation mining [35,41], previous work in this area mostly work on the identification of convincing arguments [13,44] and viewpoints [14,19] from varying argumentation genres, such as social media discussions [37], political debates [4], and student essays [6]. In this line, many existing studies focus on crafting hand-made features [37,44], such as wordings and topic strengths [43,53], echoed words [2], semantic and syntactic rules [15,30], participants' personality [42], argument interactions and structure [29], and so forth. These methods, however, require labor-intensive feature engineering process, and hence have limited generalization abilities to new domains.…”