Promoting Constructive Deliberation: Reframing for Receptiveness
This addresses the challenge of promoting constructive deliberation on controversial topics online, though it is an incremental application of existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of unconstructive online discussions by automatically reframing disagreeing responses to signal receptiveness, using six strategies from psychology and linguistics. Through experiments on a Reddit dataset, they found that reframed replies were perceived as significantly more receptive than original replies and a baseline.
To promote constructive discussion of controversial topics online, we propose automatic reframing of disagreeing responses to signal receptiveness to a preceding comment. Drawing on research from psychology, communications, and linguistics, we identify six strategies for reframing. We automatically reframe replies to comments according to each strategy, using a Reddit dataset. Through human-centered experiments, we find that the replies generated with our framework are perceived to be significantly more receptive than the original replies and a generic receptiveness baseline. We illustrate how transforming receptiveness, a particular social science construct, into a computational framework, can make LLM generations more aligned with human perceptions. We analyze and discuss the implications of our results, and highlight how a tool based on our framework might be used for more teachable and creative content moderation.