Uncovering Differences in Persuasive Language in Russian versus English Wikipedia

Bryan Li, Aleksey Panasyuk, Chris Callison-Burch


Abstract
We study how differences in persuasive language across Wikipedia articles, written in either English and Russian, can uncover each culture’s distinct perspective on different subjects. We develop a large language model (LLM) powered system to identify instances of persuasive language in multilingual texts. Instead of directly prompting LLMs to detect persuasion, which is subjective and difficult, we propose to reframe the task to instead ask high-level questions (HLQs) which capture different persuasive aspects. Importantly, these HLQs are authored by LLMs themselves. LLMs over-generate a large set of HLQs, which are subsequently filtered to a small set aligned with human labels for the original task. We then apply our approach to a large-scale, bilingual dataset of Wikipedia articles (88K total), using a two-stage identify-then-extract prompting strategy to find instances of persuasion. We quantify the amount of persuasion per article, and explore the differences in persuasion through several experiments on the paired articles. Notably, we generate rankings of articles by persuasion in both languages. These rankings match our intuitions on the culturally-salient subjects; Russian Wikipedia highlights subjects on Ukraine, while English Wikipedia highlights the Middle East. Grouping subjects into larger topics, we find politically-related events contain more persuasion than others. We further demonstrate that HLQs obtain similar performance when posed in either English or Russian. Our methodology enables cross-lingual, cross-cultural understanding at scale, and we release our code, prompts, and data.
Anthology ID:
2024.wikinlp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Lucie Lucie-Aimée, Angela Fan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Isaac Johnson, Fabio Petroni, Daniel van Strien
Venue:
WikiNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21–35
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wikinlp-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bryan Li, Aleksey Panasyuk, and Chris Callison-Burch. 2024. Uncovering Differences in Persuasive Language in Russian versus English Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia, pages 21–35, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Uncovering Differences in Persuasive Language in Russian versus English Wikipedia (Li et al., WikiNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wikinlp-1.8.pdf