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

Embedded presents and the structure of narratives

The orthodox view of tense mandates that the present tense, when embedded under a past attitude predicate, should give rise soley to what is called a "double access" reading (Abusch 1997; Ogihara1996; OgiharaSharvit2012). We consider a class of embedded presents which locate the embedded eventuality neither at the time of utterance nor the time of the attitude. Unlike some other recently identified cases of ill-behaved embedded tenses, we argue that our embedded presents are instances of the historical present, a non-indexical use of the simple present. This assimilation requires abandoning current theories of the historical present, which treat it as a purely pragmatic contextual shift (Schlenker 2004, Anand & Toosarvandani 2017}. Building on Lewis(1978), we introduce an intensional operator sensitive to a salient narrative in the context, which shifts a contextual time coordinate to a temporal vantage point on that narrative. This unifies our cases of embedded presents with their matrix counterparts, in fiction and non-fiction narratives alike

On the hardness of recognizing triangular line graphs

Given a graph G, its triangular line graph is the graph T(G) with vertex set consisting of the edges of G and adjacencies between edges that are incident in G as well as being within a common triangle. Graphs with a representation as the triangular line graph of some graph G are triangular line graphs, which have been studied under many names including anti-Gallai graphs, 2-in-3 graphs, and link graphs. While closely related to line graphs, triangular line graphs have been difficult to understand and characterize. Van Bang Le asked if recognizing triangular line graphs has an efficient algorithm or is computationally complex. We answer this question by proving that the complexity of recognizing triangular line graphs is NP-complete via a reduction from 3-SAT.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 4 table

Dream Report Pronouns, Local Binding, and Attitudes 'De Se'

No abstract

De de se

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-170).In this dissertation, I argue against a unitary treatment of individual de se ascription. Based on consideration of Yoruba logophors and English dream-report pronouns, I show that one mechanism is best analyzed as binding by an operator, which is sensitive to binding locality requirements. In contrast, I argue that cases of indexical shift (whereby token-reflexive elements such as I and tomorrow may be dependent on the context of an attitude predicate), which do not show local binding effects, are instances of overwriting of elements of the sequence of evaluation. As pronouns that are not obligatorily read de se show neither of the conditions for shifted indexicals nor West-African logophors, I argue that de se readings of these items must arise as special cases of de re ascription. Cross-linguistic instances of anti-logophoricity (i.e., the obligatory non-de se ascription of pronouns in certain contexts) are correspondingly treated as environments imposing a non-de se demand on de re ascription. Finally, I demonstrate that binding and overwriting mechanisms may both be found within the territory of de se long-distance anaphora, based largely on a systematic split in interpretation amongst Mandarin speakers on licensing and interpretative constraints on long-distance ziji.by Pranav Anand.Ph.D

Summarizing Dialogic Arguments from Social Media

Online argumentative dialog is a rich source of information on popular beliefs and opinions that could be useful to companies as well as governmental or public policy agencies. Compact, easy to read, summaries of these dialogues would thus be highly valuable. A priori, it is not even clear what form such a summary should take. Previous work on summarization has primarily focused on summarizing written texts, where the notion of an abstract of the text is well defined. We collect gold standard training data consisting of five human summaries for each of 161 dialogues on the topics of Gay Marriage, Gun Control and Abortion. We present several different computational models aimed at identifying segments of the dialogues whose content should be used for the summary, using linguistic features and Word2vec features with both SVMs and Bidirectional LSTMs. We show that we can identify the most important arguments by using the dialog context with a best F-measure of 0.74 for gun control, 0.71 for gay marriage, and 0.67 for abortion.Comment: Proceedings of the 21th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2017