@InProceedings{durmus-cardie:2018:N18-1,
  author    = {Durmus, Esin  and  Cardie, Claire},
  title     = {Exploring the Role of Prior Beliefs for Argument Persuasion},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2018},
  address   = {New Orleans, Louisiana},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1035--1045},
  abstract  = {Public debate forums provide a common platform for exchanging opinions on a topic of interest. While recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have provided empirical evidence that the language of the debaters and their patterns of interaction play a key role in changing the mind of a reader, research in psychology has shown that prior beliefs can affect our interpretation of an argument and could therefore constitute a competing alternative explanation for resistance to changing one’s stance. To study the actual effect of language use vs. prior beliefs on persuasion, we provide a new dataset and propose a controlled setting that takes into consideration two reader-level factors: political and religious ideology. We find that prior beliefs affected by these reader-level factors play a more important role than language use effects and argue that it is important to account for them in NLP studies of persuasion.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N18-1094}
}