What changed your mind : the roles of dynamic topics and discourse in argumentation process

In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the in- creasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome, largely ignoring the dynamic patterns in argumentation processes. This paper presents a study that automatically analyzes the key factors in argument persuasiveness, beyond simply predicting who will persuade whom. Specifically, we propose a novel neural model that is able to dynamically track the changes of latent topics and discourse in argumentative conversations, allowing the investigation of their roles in influencing the outcomes of persuasion. Extensive experiments have been conducted on argumentative conversations on both social media and supreme court. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in identifying persuasive arguments via explicitly exploring dynamic factors of topic and discourse. We further analyze the effects of topics and discourse on persuasiveness, and find that they are both useful -- topics provide concrete evidence while superior discourse styles may bias participants, especially in social media arguments. In addition, we draw some findings from our empirical results, which will help people better engage in future persuasive conversations

Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Look Who's Talking: Bipartite Networks as Representations of a Topic Model of New Zealand Parliamentary Speeches

Quantitative methods to measure the participation to parliamentary debate and discourse of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) and the parties they belong to are lacking. This is an exploratory study in which we propose the development of a new approach for a quantitative analysis of such participation. We utilize the New Zealand government's digital Hansard database to construct a topic model of parliamentary speeches consisting of nearly 40 million words in the period 2003-2016. A Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model is implemented in order to reveal the thematic structure of our set of documents. This generative statistical model enables the detection of major themes or topics that are publicly discussed in the New Zealand parliament, as well as permitting their classification by MP. Information on topic proportions is subsequently analyzed using a combination of statistical methods. We observe patterns arising from time-series analysis of topic frequencies which can be related to specific social, economic and legislative events. We then construct a bipartite network representation, linking MPs to topics, for each of four parliamentary terms in this time frame. We build projected networks (onto the set of nodes represented by MPs) and proceed to the study of the dynamical changes of their topology, including community structure. By performing this longitudinal network analysis, we can observe the evolution of the New Zealand parliamentary topic network and its main parties in the period studied.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figures, 3 table