Deterministic Machine Learning: Feature Importance of Persuasive Linguistic Predictors

Abstract

Generally, people\u27s opinions are difficult to change. This study searches for the most important features of persuasion. Identifying social media as one of the most difficult modes through which to change people\u27s opinions, we discovered a subreddit dedicated to the sole purpose of changing opinions. Using the data set obtained from r/ChangeMyView, we identified opinion-changing comments and ran machine learning algorithms on those comments. We then further explore those machine learning models to identify how exactly they work. By determining the feature importance and weights of the models, we will specific aspects of persuasive linguistics that influence people\u27s original opinions