Related papers: Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates
Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which…
Oxford-style debating is a well-known tool in social sciences. Such formal discussions on particular topics are widely used by historians and sociologists. However, when we try to go beyond standard thinking, it turns out that Oxford-style…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Presidential debates are viewed as providing an important public good by revealing information on candidates to voters. We consider an endogenous model of presidential debates in which an incumbent and a challenger (who is privately…
Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves. While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group discussions are…
Stack Overflow provides a means for developers to exchange knowledge. While much previous research on Stack Overflow has focused on questions and answers (Q&A), recent work has shown that discussions in comments also contain rich…
Online communities provide ample opportunities for user self-expression but generally lack the means for average users to exercise direct control over community policies. This paper sets out to identify a set of strategies and techniques…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the increasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome,…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
We survey a range of models of opinion exchange. From the introduction: "The exchange of opinions between individuals is a fundamental social interaction... Moreover, many models in this field are an excellent playground for mathematicians,…
Nowadays, open-domain dialogue models can generate acceptable responses according to the historical context based on the large-scale pre-trained language models. However, they generally concatenate the dialogue history directly as the model…
Humans engage in informal debates on a daily basis. By expressing their opinions and ideas in an argumentative fashion, they are able to gain a deeper understanding of a given problem and in some cases, find the best possible course of…
Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views…
We study here the dynamics of opinion formation in a society where we take into account of the internally held beliefs and externally expressed opinions of the individuals, which are not necessarily the same at all times. While these two…
We introduce a general contagion-like model for competing opinions that includes dynamic resistance to alternative opinions. We show that this model can describe candidate vote distributions, spatial vote correlations, and a slow approach…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…
In recent years, opinion dynamics has received an increasing attention, and various models have been introduced and evaluated mainly by simulation. In this study, we introduce and study a dynamical model inspired by the so-called `bounded…