Generating expository dialogue from monologue: Motivation, corpus and preliminary rules

Generating expository dialogue from monologue is a task that poses an interesting and rewarding challenge for Natural Language Processing. This short paper has three aims: firstly, to motivate the importance of this task, both in terms of the benefits of expository dialogue as a way to present information and in terms of potential applications; secondly, to introduce a parallel corpus of monologues and dialogues which enables a data-driven approach to this challenge; and, finally, to describe work-in-progress on semi-automatic construction of Monologueto-Dialogue (M2D) generation rules

Presenting Arguments as Fictive Dialogue

Presentation of an argument can take many different forms ranging from a monologue to advanced graphics and diagrams. This paper investigates the presentation of one or more arguments in the form of a fictive dialogue. This technique was already employed by Plato, who used fictive conversations between Socrates and his contemporaries to put his arguments forward. Ever since, there have been influential authors – including Desiderius Erasmus, Sir Thomas More and Mark Twain – that have used dialogue in this way. In this paper, we define the notion of a fictive dialogue, motivate it is as a topic for investigation, and present a qualitative and quantitative study of five fictive dialogues by well-known authors. We conclude by indicating how our preliminary and ongoing investigations may inform the development of systems that automatically generate argumentative fictive dialogue

Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion

Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others. We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.Comment: European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017

Meta-epistemic defeat

An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional (first-order) epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory (e.g., Olson 2011, Reasons for belief; cf., Streumer 2012, J Philos 110:1–25) and epistemic relativism (e.g., MacFarlane 2005, Oxford Stud Epistemol 1:197–233; 2011; 2014, Assessment sensitivity: Relative truth and its applications). Mechanisms of traditional epistemic defeat and meta-epistemic defeat are compared and contrasted, and some new puzzles are introduced

Talking Nets: A Multi-Agent Connectionist Approach to Communication and Trust between Individuals

A multi-agent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other, and as such is a network of networks. The individual recurrent networks simulate the process of information uptake, integration and memorization within individual agents, while the communication of beliefs and opinions between agents is propagated along connections between the individual networks. A crucial aspect in belief updating based on information from other agents is the trust in the information provided. In the model, trust is determined by the consistency with the receiving agents’ existing beliefs, and results in changes of the connections between individual networks, called trust weights. Thus activation spreading and weight change between individual networks is analogous to standard connectionist processes, although trust weights take a specific function. Specifically, they lead to a selective propagation and thus filtering out of less reliable information, and they implement Grice’s (1975) maxims of quality and quantity in communication. The unique contribution of communicative mechanisms beyond intra-personal processing of individual networks was explored in simulations of key phenomena involving persuasive communication and polarization, lexical acquisition, spreading of stereotypes and rumors, and a lack of sharing unique information in group decisions

Evidence-based Advertising

Extensive and repeated testing of a wide variety of alternative reasonable hypotheses is necessary in order to increase knowledge about complex phenomena such as advertising. While non-experimental evidence is useful for less complex issues, laboratory and field experiments, as well as quasi-experimental studies, are needed to obtain useful knowledge about complex ones. Fortunately, much useful empirical research has been conducted on how to create an effective advertisement. A literature review, conducted over 16 years, summarized knowledge from 687 sources that included more than 3,000 studies. The review led to 195 condition-action statements (laws or principles) for advertising. Advertisers often fail to follow these principles, perhaps because they have not previously been available in a codified form. (We were unable to find the principles in a convenience sample of nine advertising textbooks; of the more than 6,500 references in these textbooks, only 24 overlapped with the 687 used to develop the principles.) By using these principles, practitioners can substantially increase advertising effectiveness. There are also opportunities for researchers. Relevant evidence-based papers were published at the rate of 20 per year from 2000 through 2009. The rate of knowledge accumulation could be increased via directed research (e.g., invited papers and business-sponsored research), and by publishing evidence-based research findings on the Internet

When win-argument pedagogy is a loss for the composition classroom

Despite the effort educators put into developing in students the critical writing and thinking skills needed to compose effective arguments, undergraduate college students are often accused of churning out essays lacking in creative and critical thought, arguments too obviously formulated and with sides too sharply drawn. Theories abound as to why these deficiencies are rampant. Some blame students’ immature cognitive and emotional development for these lacks. Others put the blame of lackadaisical output on the assigning of shopworn writing subjects, assigned topics such as on American laws and attitudes about capital punishment and abortion. Although these factors might contribute to faulty written output in some cases, the prevailing hindrance is our very pedagogy, a system in which students are rewarded for composing the very type of argument we wish to avoid — the eristic, in which the goal is not truth seeking, but successfully disputing another’s argument. Certainly the eristic argument is the intended solution in cases when a clear‑cut outcome is needed, such as in legal battles and political campaigns when there can only be one winner. However, teaching mainly or exclusively the eristic, as is done in most composition classrooms today, halts the advancement of these higher‑order inquiry skills we try developing in our students

Attenuating Consumer Reactance to Threatening Messages: The Moderating Role of Construal Level

While many persuasive communications tend to be perceived as increasing consumer choice, others, such as public service announcements, more or less forcefully restrict that choice. This research examines the effects of threats to freedom on receptivity to message information, as a function of the level of construal at which the message is processed. The findings indicate that consumers are more open to high threat message information at high (vs. low) levels of construal, and this pattern holds when construal level is manipulated via message wording (study one) or is non-consciously primed prior to message exposure (study two). Also, the results point to the level of detail at which the message is considered, and the resulting use of persuasion knowledge, as the underlying reason for this pattern of results (study three). Specifically, at high levels of detail (i.e. low construal) there is a greater use of persuasion knowledge and lower information receptivity in face of high threat to freedom messages. At low level of detail (high construal), by contrast, persuasion knowledge use is lower and receptivity to information in freedom threatening messages higher

The Anatomy of a Controlling Message and the Impact of Reactance on Attitude Certainty

Psychological reactance theory (Brehm, 1966) has helped guide research on resistance to persuasion for over a half century. The theory holds that individuals value their freedom to make their own decisions, and when presented with a persuasive message, may perceive threat to their autonomy and react adversely to the message. Impersonal or mass disseminated messages, particularly those in pro-social or health related contexts, often must communicate in a manner that is direct and forceful to get a clear point across as efficiently as possible. Such messages can be characterized as high controlling (HC) and are generally constructed by using explicit language in conjunction with choice-restricting phrases. Although HC messages tend to elicit reactance, scholars have argued that they hold value in certain contexts (e.g., Shen, 2015). Further, when people experience reactance against a HC message, and ostensibly resist persuasion, little is known about the relationship between reactance and attitude certainty. Three studies were conducted to a) test the interplay between varying levels of explicitness and dominance in persuasive messages and b) to examine how the experience of reactance impacts attitude certainty toward the topic of a message. Study 1 found choice-restricting language, and not the degree of explicitness, to be responsible for adverse outcomes, suggesting that messages, if carefully constructed, could benefit from the quality of being explicit with little concern for eliciting reactance. Results from both Study 1 and Study 2 indicated that when people are presented with persuasive messages, particularly messages that inspire reactance, they are more likely to report less attitude certainty than those presented with a non-persuasive message. A third study attempted to further reduce attitude certainty by using feedback mechanisms designed either to call attention to the receiver’s reactance as an illegitimate strategy for rejecting a message or to request receivers to take the perspective of the counter-position to help generate arguments in favor of the opposing view. The feedback options utilized in Study 3 failed to reduce certainty compared to a no-feedback condition. Overall, the findings of the current dissertation suggest that a) explicit language can be used in conjunction with choice-enhancing language to create messages that are clear and direct yet free from the threat of reactance and b) the certainty with which people hold their reported attitudes are more likely to be diminished than they are to be bolstered after experiencing reactance