A study of the impact of persuasive argumentation in political debates

Amparo Elizabeth Cano-Basave, Yulan He

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

Persuasive communication is the process of shaping, reinforcing and changing others' responses. In political debates, speakers express their views towards the debated topics by choosing both the content of their discourse and the argumentation process. In this work we study the use of semantic frames for modelling argumentation in speakers' discourse. We investigate the impact of a speaker's argumentation style and their effect in influencing an audience in supporting their candidature. We model the influence index of each candidate based on their relative standings in the polls released prior to the debate and present a system which ranks speakers in terms of their relative influence using a combination of content and persuasive argumentation features. Our results show that although content alone is predictive of a speaker's influence rank, persuasive argumentation also affects such indices.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationhuman language technologies
Place of PublicationStroudsburg, PA (US)
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages1405-1413
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-9416-4391-4
Publication statusPublished - 17 Jul 2016
Event15th Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - San Diego, CA, United States
Duration: 12 Jun 201617 Jun 2016

Conference

Conference15th Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Abbreviated titleNAACL HLT 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego, CA
Period12/06/1617/06/16

Bibliographical note

© 2016 Association for Computational Linguistics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A study of the impact of persuasive argumentation in political debates'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this