Strategies of objectification in opinion articles: the case of evidentials

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus (30 texts) about oil drilling issues in the Adriatic Sea. Lexical evidentials (e.g. see, must, find, evidently) indicate “the kind of justification for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim […]” (Anderson 1986: 274). They constitute a privileged viewpoint to investigate how and at which degree journalists manage to present their claims as objective since they work as argumentative indicators (Van Eemeren et al. 2007), pointing to inherently subjective (e.g. I find that x) or possibly objective (e.g. It must be that x) standpoints and to basic (e.g. see) or assailable (e.g. apparently) premises (Rocci 2013, Musi 2014) depending on their lexical semantics. On these grounds, I will retrieve all the attested evidentials and annotate them at different levels including the types of standpoints and the type of premises they introduce (Freeman 2000, 2005). Once finished the annotation, I will compare the results of the analysis at different levels and I will try to undertstand which features make evidentials privileged strategies of subjectification or objectification. References Eemeren, F. H. van, Houtlosser, P. and Snoeck Henkemans, F. (2007). Argumentative indicators in Discourse. A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Amsterdam: Springer. Freeman, J. (2000). What Types of Statements are There? Argumentation 14(2): 135-157. Freeman, J. (2005). Acceptable Premises: An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rocci, A. (2013). Modal conversational backgrounds and evidential bases in predictions: the view from the Italian modals. In K. Jaszczolt and L. de Saussure (Eds.), Time: Language, Cognition and Reality (pp. 128-156). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Musi, E. (2014). Evidential modals at the semantic-argumentative interface: appearance verbs as indicators of defeasible argumentation. Informal Logic 34 (3): 417-442

Evidently epistential adverbs are argumentative indicators: A corpus-based study

Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of arguments. However, a comprehensive lexicon of these linguistic devices is so far lacking due to the scarcity of corpora argumentatively annotated and the absence of an empirically validated analytic methodology. Recent studies have shown that modals, that express that things might be otherwise, and evidentials, that point to the presence of information sources, are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators. On these grounds, we propose a systematic, non-language specific corpus-based procedure to identify indicators of argumentative discourse relations. We test the design of a multi-level annotation through the analysis of the English and Italian epistential adverbs evidently and evidentemente in comparable corpora of newspaper articles. We show that the annotation guidelines achieve consistent analytical results with expert annotators. Data analysis reveals that the two adverbs work as argumentative indicator both at the structural and at the inferential level: besides pointing to the presence of premises-conclusion relations, they recurrently pattern with causal argument schemes from the effect to the cause. The Italian adverb evidentemente is less polysemous and more frequent, thus working as a more reliable indicator

ChangeMyView Through Concessions: Do Concessions Increase Persuasion?

In Discourse Studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increase persuasion. We aim to empirically test this hypothesis by calculating the distribution of argumentative concessions in persuasive vs. non-persuasive comments from the the ChangeMyView subreddit. This constitutes a challenging task since concessions do not always bear an argumentative role and are expressed through polysemous lexical markers. Drawing from a theoretically-informed typology of concessions, we first conduct a crowdsourcing task to label a set of polysemous lexical markers as introducing an argumentative concession relation or not. Second, we present a self-training method to automatically identify argumentative concessions using linguistically motivated features. While we achieve a moderate F1 of 57.4% via the self-training method, our subsequent error analysis highlights that the self training method is able to generalize and identify other types of concessions that are argumentative, but were not considered in the annotation guidelines. Our findings from the manual labeling and the classification experiments indicate that the type of argumentative concessions we investigated is almost equally likely to be used in winning and losing arguments. While this result seems to contradict theoretical assumptions, we provide some reasons related to the ChangeMyView subreddit

The rule of truth: how fallacies can help stem the Covid-19 infodemic

Alongside COVID-19 as a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization was quick to declare COVID-19 an infodemic, a superabundance of online and offline information with the potential to undermine public health efforts. Here, Dr. Elinor Carmi, Dr. Myrto Aloumpi and Dr. Elena Musi discuss how philosophical fallacies can be instrumentalised in response to the COVID-19 infodemic and assist those coming into contact with fake news resist its rhetorical appeal

Interpreting Verbal Irony: Linguistic Strategies and the Connection to the Type of Semantic Incongruity

Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct a crowdsourcing task: given an utterance expressing verbal irony, users are asked to verbalize their interpretation of the speaker\u27s ironic message. We propose a typology of linguistic strategies for verbal irony interpretation and link it to various theoretical linguistic frameworks. We design computational models to capture these strategies and present empirical studies aimed to answer three questions: (1) what is the distribution of linguistic strategies used by hearers to interpret ironic messages?; (2) do hearers adopt similar strategies for interpreting the speaker\u27s ironic intent?; and (3) does the type of semantic incongruity in the ironic message (explicit vs. implicit) influence the choice of interpretation strategies by the hearers

Developing misinformation immunity:How to reason-check fallacious news in a human–computer interaction environment

To counter the fake news phenomenon, the scholarly community has attempted to debunk and prebunk disinformation. However, misinformation still constitutes a major challenge due to the variety of misleading techniques and their continuous updates which call for the exercise of critical thinking to build resilience. In this study we present two open access chatbots, the Fake News Immunity Chatbot and the Vaccinating News Chatbot, which combine Fallacy Theory and Human–Computer Interaction to inoculate citizens and communication gatekeepers against misinformation. These chatbots differ from existing tools both in function and form. First, they target misinformation and enhance the identification of fallacious arguments; and second, they are multiagent and leverage discourse theories of persuasion in their conversational design. After having described both their backend and their frontend design, we report on the evaluation of the user interface and impact on users’ critical thinking skills through a questionnaire, a crowdsourced survey, and a pilot qualitative experiment. The results shed light on the best practices to design user-friendly active inoculation tools and reveal that the two chatbots are perceived as increasing critical thinking skills in the current misinformation ecosystem