In Opinion Holders’ Shoes: Modeling Cumulative Influence for View Change in Online Argumentation

Understanding how people change their views during multiparty argumentative discussions is important in applications that involve human communication, e.g., in social media and education. Existing research focuses on lexical features of individual comments, dynamics of discussions, or the personalities of participants but deemphasizes the cumulative influence of the interplay of comments by different participants on a participant’s mindset. We address the task of predicting the points where a user’s view changes given an entire discussion, thereby tackling the confusion due to multiple plausible alternatives when considering the entirety of a discussion. We make the following contributions. (1) Through a human study, we show that modeling a user’s perception of comments is crucial in predicting persuasiveness. (2) We present a sequential model for cumulative influence that captures the interplay between comments as both local and nonlocal dependencies, and demonstrate its capability of selecting the most effective information for changing views. (3) We identify contextual and interactive features and propose sequence structures to incorporate these features. Our empirical evaluation using a Reddit Change My View dataset shows that contextual and interactive features are valuable in predicting view changes, and a sequential model notably outperforms the nonsequential baseline models.