Corpus for Modeling User Interactions in Online Persuasive Discussions

Ryo Egawa, Gaku Morio, Katsuhide Fujita


Abstract
Persuasions are common in online arguments such as discussion forums. To analyze persuasive strategies, it is important to understand how individuals construct posts and comments based on the semantics of the argumentative components. In addition to understanding how we construct arguments, understanding how a user post interacts with other posts (i.e., argumentative inter-post relation) still remains a challenge. Therefore, in this study, we developed a novel annotation scheme and corpus that capture both user-generated inner-post arguments and inter-post relations between users in ChangeMyView, a persuasive forum. Our corpus consists of arguments with 4612 elementary units (EUs) (i.e., propositions), 2713 EU-to-EU argumentative relations, and 605 inter-post argumentative relations in 115 threads. We analyzed the annotated corpus to identify the characteristics of online persuasive arguments, and the results revealed persuasive documents have more claims than non-persuasive ones and different interaction patterns among persuasive and non-persuasive documents. Our corpus can be used as a resource for analyzing persuasiveness and training an argument mining system to identify and extract argument structures. The annotated corpus and annotation guidelines have been made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.143
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1135–1141
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.143
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ryo Egawa, Gaku Morio, and Katsuhide Fujita. 2020. Corpus for Modeling User Interactions in Online Persuasive Discussions. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1135–1141, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Corpus for Modeling User Interactions in Online Persuasive Discussions (Egawa et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.143.pdf