CLIP colloquium: Lu Wang (Northeastern U)

Abstract

Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government. While argument content and linguistic style both affect debate outcomes, limited work has been done on the interplay between the two. In the first part of the talk, I will present a joint model that estimates the inherent persuasive strengths of different topics, the effects of numerous linguistic features, and the interactions between the two as they affect debate audiences. By experimenting with Oxford-style debates, our model predicts audience-adjudicated winners with 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming linguistic features alone. We also find that winning sides employ more strong arguments (as corroborated by human judgment) and debaters all tend to shift topics to stronger ground. The model further allows us to identify the linguistic features associated with strong or weak arguments.