Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?

Michiel van der Meer, Piek Vossen, Catholijn Jonker, Pradeep Murukannaiah


Abstract
Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in personal values are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.992
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15986–16008
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.992
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.992
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michiel van der Meer, Piek Vossen, Catholijn Jonker, and Pradeep Murukannaiah. 2023. Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15986–16008, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions? (van der Meer et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.992.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.992.mp4