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

A Narrative Sentence Planner and Structurer for Domain Independent, Parameterizable Storytelling

Storytelling is an integral part of daily life and a key part of how we share information and connect with others. The ability to use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to produce stories that are tailored and adapted to the individual reader could have large impact in many different applications. However, one reason that this has not become a reality to date is the NLG story gap, a disconnect between the plan-type representations that story generation engines produce, and the linguistic representations needed by NLG engines. Here we describe Fabula Tales, a storytelling system supporting both story generation and NLG. With manual annotation of texts from existing stories using an intuitive user interface, Fabula Tales automatically extracts the underlying story representation and its accompanying syntactically grounded representation. Narratological and sentence planning parameters are applied to these structures to generate different versions of the story. We show how our storytelling system can alter the story at the sentence level, as well as the discourse level. We also show that our approach can be applied to different kinds of stories by testing our approach on both Aesop’s Fables and first-person blogs posted on social media. The content and genre of such stories varies widely, supporting our claim that our approach is general and domain independent. We then conduct several user studies to evaluate the generated story variations and show that Fabula Tales’ automatically produced variations are perceived as more immediate, interesting, and correct, and are preferred to a baseline generation system that does not use narrative parameters

The Role Mentoring Plays in the Transition to Practice of Newly Credentialed Athletic Trainers

Context: Mentoring has been identified as an important method of supporting newly credentialed athletic trainers (ATs) during their transition to practice. Gaining a better understanding of this relationship could provide valuable insights that may assist employers and professional programs in developing a plan to better facilitate the transition. Objective: To examine which aspects of the mentoring relationship provided the most benefit during the transition to practice of newly certified ATs. Design: Qualitative study. Setting: Individual phone interviews. Patients or Other Participants: A total of 13 ATs who graduated from a professional master\u27s program, were certified from February through July 2016, and obtained employment from July through August 2016 participated in this study (6 women, 7 men; age = 26 ± 3 years; work settings included professional sports, college, secondary and middle school, and clinic). Data saturation guided the number of participants. Data Collection and Analysis: Phone interviews using a semistructured interview guide were conducted at 3, 8, and 12 months of work experience. Data were analyzed using a constant comparative approach. Credibility was established via investigator triangulation, peer debriefing, and member checks. Participants recognized the mentoring relationship as a foundational aspect of the transition to practice. Mentors should be available by phone, email, or text to answer questions, provide feedback, or discuss ideas. Respondents wanted honest feedback, even when that feedback was constructively critical. Feedback was sought regarding topics such as patient care, communication, and networking. Participants needed reassurance and support from their mentors to help validate and improve their self-confidence. Conclusions: Newly credentialed ATs should seek mentors who will be available to communicate in various ways and will provide regular and constructive feedback. Future researchers should investigate how mentoring relationships influence other aspects of the transition to practice, such as patient care, overall job performance, turnover, and satisfaction

The Role Mentoring Plays in the Transition of Practice of Newly Credentialed Athletic Trainers

Context: Mentoring has been identified as an important method to support newly credentialed athletic trainers during their transition to practice. Gaining a better understanding of this relationship could provide valuable insights that may assist employers and professional programs to develop a plan, which could better facilitate the transition. Objective: To examine what aspects of the mentoring relationship provided the most benefit during transition to practice. Design: Grounded theory. Setting: Individual phone interviews. Patients or Other Participants: 13 athletic trainers who graduated from a professional master\u27s program, were certified between February and July of 2016, and obtained employment between July to August 11 of 2016 participated in this study (6 female, 7 male, 26±3 years; work settings included professional sports, college, secondary and middle school, and clinic). Data saturation guided the number of participants. Data Collection and Analysis: Phone interviews using a semi-structured interview guide were conducted at 3, 8 and twelve months of work experience. Data were analyzed using a constant comparative approach. Credibility was established through investigator triangulation, peer debriefing, and member checks. Results: Participants recognized the mentoring relationship as a foundational aspect of the transition to practice. Mentors should be available by phone, email, and/or text and to answer questions, provide feedback and/or discuss ideas. Participants want honest feedback, even when that feedback is constructively critical. Feedback was sought regarding topics such as patient care, communication, and networking. Participants needed reassurance and support from their mentor which helped to validate and improve confidence. Conclusions: Newly credentialed athletic trainers should seek a mentor who will be available to communicate in various ways and provide regular and constructive feedback. Future research should investigate how mentoring relationships influence other aspects of the transition such as patient care, overall job performance, turnover, and satisfaction