Related papers: I Beg to Differ: A study of constructive disagreem…
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,…
This paper examines if large language models (LLMs) can help people write constructive comments on divisive social issues due to the difficulty of expressing constructive disagreement online. Through controlled experiments with 600…
Though current researches often study the properties of online social relationship from an objective view, we also need to understand individuals' subjective opinions on their interrelationships in social computing studies. Inspired by the…
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word "community" here is deliberate: what is controversial to some…
We investigate the task of modeling open-domain, multi-turn, unstructured, multi-participant, conversational dialogue. We specifically study the effect of incorporating different elements of the conversation. Unlike previous efforts, which…
Research on dialogue constructiveness assessment focuses on (i) analysing conversational factors that influence individuals to take specific actions, win debates, change their perspectives or broaden their open-mindedness and (ii)…
Philosophical accounts of persuasion often assume that shared evidence and rational argumentation should lead to a convergence of views between peers, yet everyday discourse often suggests otherwise. In this study, we use large language…
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent…
This paper presents an unsupervised framework for jointly modeling topic content and discourse behavior in microblog conversations. Concretely, we propose a neural model to discover word clusters indicating what a conversation concerns…
This paper presents models for detecting agreement/disagreement in online discussions. In this work we show that by using a Siamese inspired architecture to encode the discussions, we no longer need to rely on hand-crafted features to…
Neural network language models can serve as computational hypotheses about how humans process language. We compared the model-human consistency of diverse language models using a novel experimental approach: controversial sentence pairs.…
To promote constructive discussion of controversial topics online, we propose automatic reframing of disagreeing responses to signal receptiveness to a preceding comment. Drawing on research from psychology, communications, and linguistics,…
Agonism plays a vital role in democratic dialogue by fostering diverse perspectives and robust discussions. Within the realm of online conflict there is another type: hateful antagonism, which undermines constructive dialogue. Detecting…
In this work we study the dynamical features of editorial wars in Wikipedia (WP). Based on our previously established algorithm, we build up samples of controversial and peaceful articles and analyze the temporal characteristics of the…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
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…
As large language models (LLMs) enter the mainstream, aligning them to foster constructive dialogue rather than exacerbate societal divisions is critical. Using an individualized and multicultural alignment dataset of over 7,500…
The Internet has provided us with great opportunities for large scale collaborative public good projects. Wikipedia is a predominant example of such projects where conflicts emerge and get resolved through bottom-up mechanisms leading to…
People leverage group discussions to collaborate in order to solve complex tasks, e.g. in project meetings or hiring panels. By doing so, they engage in a variety of conversational strategies where they try to convince each other of the…
The speech act of complaining is used by humans to communicate a negative mismatch between reality and expectations as a reaction to an unfavorable situation. Linguistic theory of pragmatics categorizes complaints into various severity…