Self-reported Demographics and Discourse Dynamics in a Persuasive Online Forum

Agnieszka Falenska, Eva Maria Vecchi, Gabriella Lapesa


Abstract
Research on language as interactive discourse underscores the deliberate use of demographic parameters such as gender, ethnicity, and class to shape social identities. For example, by explicitly disclosing one’s information and enforcing one’s social identity to an online community, the reception by and interaction with the said community is impacted, e.g., strengthening one’s opinions by depicting the speaker as credible through their experience in the subject. Here, we present a first thorough study of the role and effects of self-disclosures on online discourse dynamics, focusing on a pervasive type of self-disclosure: author gender. Concretely, we investigate the contexts and properties of gender self-disclosures and their impact on interaction dynamics in an online persuasive forum, ChangeMyView. Our contribution is twofold. At the level of the target phenomenon, we fill a research gap in the understanding of the impact of these self-disclosures on the discourse by bringing together features related to forum activity (votes, number of comments), linguistic/stylistic features from the literature, and discourse topics. At the level of the contributed resource, we enrich and release a comprehensive dataset that will provide a further impulse for research on the interplay between gender disclosures, community interaction, and persuasion in online discourse.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1272
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
14606–14621
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1272
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Agnieszka Falenska, Eva Maria Vecchi, and Gabriella Lapesa. 2024. Self-reported Demographics and Discourse Dynamics in a Persuasive Online Forum. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14606–14621, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Self-reported Demographics and Discourse Dynamics in a Persuasive Online Forum (Falenska et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1272.pdf