Related papers: Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates

In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…

We investigate the birth and diffusion of lexical innovations in a large dataset of online social communities. We build on sociolinguistic theories and focus on the relation between the spread of a novel term and the social role of the…

One growing use of computer-based communication media is for gathering people to initiate or sustain social events. Although the use of computer-mediated communication and social network sites such as Facebook for event promotion is…

Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…

Understanding how opinions spread through a community or how consensus emerges in noisy environments can have a significant impact on our comprehension of social relations among individuals. In this work a model for the dynamics of opinion…

Online forums provide rich environments where users may post questions and comments about different topics. Understanding how people behave in online forums may shed light on the fundamental mechanisms by which collective thinking emerges…

We present a general theoretical model for the spatio-temporal dynamics of animal contests. Inspired by interactions between physical particles, the model is formulated in terms of effective interaction potentials, which map typical…

While multi-agent debate has been proposed as a promising strategy for improving AI reasoning ability, we find that debate can sometimes be harmful rather than helpful. Prior work has primarily focused on debates within homogeneous groups…

As an epistemic activity, rational debate and discussion requires cooperation, yet involves a tension between collective and individual interests. While all participants benefit from collective outcomes like reaching consensus on true…

We study the formation of public opinion in a poll process where the current score is open to public. The voters are assumed to vote probabilistically for or against their own preference considering the group opinion collected up to then in…

One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…

Online spaces provide individuals with the opportunity to engage in discussions on important topics and make collective decisions, regardless of their geographic location or time zone. However, without adequate support and careful design,…

In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…

Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions eventually yield a consensus opinion; in others, they can lead to opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of…

Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings. However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers in digital…

In this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens…

The ability to engage in mixed-initiative interaction is one of the core requirements for a conversational search system. How to achieve this is poorly understood. We propose a set of unsupervised metrics, termed ConversationShape, that…

This review outlines the major approaches to modelling opinion formation and manipulation in mathematics and computer science. Key tools such as ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic models, control theory, and interaction…

The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…

Students express a wide range of preferences for learning environments. We are trying to measure the manifestation of learning styles in various learning environments. In particular, we are interested in performance in an environment that…