Persuasive language and features of formality on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit

Dayter, Daria; Messerli, Thomas C.

doi:10.1075/ip.00072.day

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…CORE is sampled from the searchable English-language web and aims to be representative of the distribution of registers (or genres) found online. Recent work in both linguistics and NLP has, however, demonstrated challenges of categorizing language use on the web pertaining to its extreme variation within and across classes (Titak and Robertson, 2013;Dayter and Messerli, 2021;Madjarov et al, 2019;. Therefore, explanation methods are especially needed in web register classification, in order to explore the robustness and linguistic motivation of blackbox models.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Classes through Stable Word Attributions

Rönnqvist¹,

Kyröläinen²,

Myntti³

et al. 2022

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

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Input saliency methods have recently become a popular tool for explaining predictions of deep learning models in NLP. Nevertheless, there has been little work investigating methods for aggregating prediction-level explanations to the class level, nor has a framework for evaluating such class explanations been established. We explore explanations based on XLM-R and the Integrated Gradients input attribution method, and propose 1) the Stable Attribution Class Explanation method (SACX) to extract keyword lists of classes in text classification tasks, and 2) a framework for the systematic evaluation of the keyword lists. We find that explanations of individual predictions are prone to noise, but that stable explanations can be effectively identified through repeated training and explanation. We evaluate on web register data and show that the class explanations are linguistically meaningful and distinguishing of the classes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Classes through Stable Word Attributions

Rönnqvist¹,

Kyröläinen²,

Myntti³

et al. 2022

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

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“…Class 3: Informality Findings of Dayter & Messerli (2022) indicate that there is no difference between persuasive and non-persuasive comments in terms of their use of informal language. In order to test whether these findings are replicated in this corpus, we measured the use of informal language by deriving the scores from 'swear words' and 'second person' psychometric vocabularies in LIWC, and counting the instances of the exclamation and question marks.…”

Section: Constructs and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, it's also possible that deltaboard members are not just more likely to cite evidence, but more likely to argue about certain topics or in particular ways. Comparatively surface-level features may also be important in persuasion: For example, the use of formal versus informal language has also been explored in predicting persuasion (Dayter & Messerli, 2022), though there is little evidence this factor predicts the persuasiveness of an argument. These questions, among others, are what we set out to investigate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characteristics of persuasive deltaboard members on Reddit’s r/ChangeMyView

Papakonstantinou¹,

Horne²

2023

Preprint

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Reddit’s subforum ChangeMyView is a subreddit where users post about a specific view they hold and chal- lenge other users to present arguments to change their view. Here, we investigated what distinguishes the most convincing participants on Reddit change my view (henceforth, top persuaders), as measured by the all- time deltaboard, from equally active users who are nonetheless less likely to persuade peoples on the fo- rum. We investigated the most common features of top persuaders and compared them to their similarly active Reddit counterparts. We found that top persuaders were more likely to provide external evidence for their claims and use morality-based reasoning, made longer com- ments and engaged in more back-and-forth argumenta- tion, were less likely to use informal language in their arguments, and were more likely to show some over- lapping semantic content with an original poster’s com- ment. Other content was comparatively less effective: including the use of causal language, and asking ques- tions in an argument, among others. These findings replicate and expand on previously established effects and may highlight ways to develop more effective edu- cational interventions.

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“…Each of the independent subreddits (as of January 2021, there are over 2,620,000, cf. https://backlinko.com/reddit-users) has its own motives, goals, and functions ranging from informative to purely entertaining, and each is subject to independent analysis (e.g., Dayter & Messerli, 2021; Dynel, 2020a, 2020b; Dynel & Poppi, 2019, 2020), while no sweeping socio-cultural generalizations should be made about the numerous communities (whose individual demographies cannot possibly be discovered) or the totality of users operating on Reddit. The only generalization that can be made about this platform is that all subreddits hinge on user-generated content (whether original or reposted) that must follow the jointly negotiated rules holding for a given subreddit; each item can be duly commented on, upvoted (or downvoted) and given awards, whereby Redditors generate their Reddit “karma” across the subreddits on which they are active (see Dynel & Poppi, 2019; Kilgo et al, 2018; Massanari, 2015).…”

Section: Scambaiting On Reddit’s R/scambaitmentioning

confidence: 99%

You Don’t Fool Me: On Scams, Scambaiting, Deception, and Epistemological Ambiguity at R/scambait on Reddit

Dynel

Ross

2021

Social Media + Society

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With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users’ communicative activities on Reddit’s r/scambait subreddit. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by both scammers and scambaiters, as well as Redditors’ untruthfulness in their fabricated posts. The analysis reveals that the r/scambait subreddit exists as a site of humorous entertainment arising from various forms of deception. Scammers’ deceptive strategies are depicted as amusingly naïve and inefficient, while scambaiters’ deceptive messages targeted at scammers demonstrate great creativity and wittiness. In both cases, scammer-victims are disparaged for being immensely gullible or downright stupid; and Redditors earn online plaudits for submitting the most upvoted posts. Our significant finding is that posts such as those at r/scambait should never be taken at face value due to their inherent epistemological ambiguity, to which the users choose to remain oblivious or indifferent. Furthermore, on a general plane, this study indicates a potential shift in the emic understanding of the concept of “scambaiting” from a punitive measure and an educational instrument to a creative practice geared toward posters’ kudos and users’ joint humorous experience through “baitertainment” and “scamusement.”

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Persuasive language and features of formality on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit

Cited by 10 publications

References 40 publications

Explaining Classes through Stable Word Attributions

Explaining Classes through Stable Word Attributions

Characteristics of persuasive deltaboard members on Reddit’s r/ChangeMyView

You Don’t Fool Me: On Scams, Scambaiting, Deception, and Epistemological Ambiguity at R/scambait on Reddit

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