Let’s Make Your Request More Persuasive: Modeling Persuasive Strategies via Semi-Supervised Neural Nets on Crowdfunding Platforms

Diyi Yang, Jiaao Chen, Zichao Yang, Dan Jurafsky, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
Modeling what makes a request persuasive - eliciting the desired response from a reader - is critical to the study of propaganda, behavioral economics, and advertising. Yet current models can’t quantify the persuasiveness of requests or extract successful persuasive strategies. Building on theories of persuasion, we propose a neural network to quantify persuasiveness and identify the persuasive strategies in advocacy requests. Our semi-supervised hierarchical neural network model is supervised by the number of people persuaded to take actions and partially supervised at the sentence level with human-labeled rhetorical strategies. Our method outperforms several baselines, uncovers persuasive strategies - offering increased interpretability of persuasive speech - and has applications for other situations with document-level supervision but only partial sentence supervision.
Anthology ID:
N19-1364
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3620–3630
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1364
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1364
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Diyi Yang, Jiaao Chen, Zichao Yang, Dan Jurafsky, and Eduard Hovy. 2019. Let’s Make Your Request More Persuasive: Modeling Persuasive Strategies via Semi-Supervised Neural Nets on Crowdfunding Platforms. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3620–3630, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Let’s Make Your Request More Persuasive: Modeling Persuasive Strategies via Semi-Supervised Neural Nets on Crowdfunding Platforms (Yang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1364.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/356153695