Related papers: Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates
Binary decision-making process is ubiquitous in social life and is of vital significance in many real-world issues, ranging from public health to political campaigns. While continuous opinion evolution independent of discrete choice…
We investigate the characteristics of factual and emotional argumentation styles observed in online debates. Using an annotated set of "factual" and "feeling" debate forum posts, we extract patterns that are highly correlated with factual…
In this paper, a method of modeling the dynamics of electronic discussions is proposed based on the so called FOPDT model (First Order Plus Dead Time) known from the process control. Knowledge of the model points to possibility of…
The strategic behaviour of pedestrians is largely determined by how they perceive and react to neighbouring people. This issue is addressed in this paper by a model which combines, in a time and space-dependent way, discrete and continuous…
We study open domain dialogue generation with dialogue acts designed to explain how people engage in social chat. To imitate human behavior, we propose managing the flow of human-machine interactions with the dialogue acts as policies. The…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
In many domains of life, business and management, numerous problems are addressed by small groups of individuals engaged in face-to-face discussions. While research in social psychology has a long history of studying the determinants of…
Engaging learners in dialogue around controversial issues is essential for examining diverse values and perspectives in pluralistic societies. While prior research has identified productive discussion moves mainly in STEM-oriented contexts,…
The information flow inside a P2P network is highly dependent on the network structure. In order to ease the diffusion of relevant data toward interested peers, many P2P protocols gather similar nodes by putting them in direct contact. With…
Wikipedia is one of the largest online encyclopedias, which relies on scientific publications as authoritative sources. The increasing prevalence of open access (OA) publishing has expanded the public availability of scientific knowledge;…
Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
Understanding how ideas relate to each other is a fundamental question in many domains, ranging from intellectual history to public communication. Because ideas are naturally embedded in texts, we propose the first framework to…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
A general model of opinion dynamics is introduced in which each individual's opinion is measured on a bounded continuous spectrum. Each opinion is influenced heterogeneously by every other opinion in the population. It is demonstrated that…
Digital communication has made the public discourse considerably more complex, and new actors and strategies have emerged as a result of this seismic shift. Aside from the often-studied interactions among individuals during opinion…
Messages conveyed by media act as a major drive in shaping attitudes and inducing opinion shift. On the other hand, individuals are strongly affected by peer pressure while forming their own judgment. We solve a general model of opinion…
Contemporary debates on "open science" mostly focus on the pub- lic accessibility of the products of scientific and academic work. In contrast, this paper presents arguments for "opening" the ongoing work of science. That is, this paper is…
While the number and variety of models to explain opinion exchange dynamics is huge, attempts to justify the model results using empirical data are relatively rare. As linking to real data is essential for establishing model credibility,…
This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing…