Exploring the Role of Prior Beliefs for Argument Persuasion
This addresses the problem of understanding persuasion mechanisms in NLP for public debate analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing psychological and NLP research.
The study investigated whether prior beliefs or language use more strongly influence persuasion in online debates, finding that political and religious ideologies (prior beliefs) have a greater impact than linguistic factors.
Public debate forums provide a common platform for exchanging opinions on a topic of interest. While recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have provided empirical evidence that the language of the debaters and their patterns of interaction play a key role in changing the mind of a reader, research in psychology has shown that prior beliefs can affect our interpretation of an argument and could therefore constitute a competing alternative explanation for resistance to changing one's stance. To study the actual effect of language use vs. prior beliefs on persuasion, we provide a new dataset and propose a controlled setting that takes into consideration two reader level factors: political and religious ideology. We find that prior beliefs affected by these reader level factors play a more important role than language use effects and argue that it is important to account for them in NLP studies of persuasion.