Exploring the Role of Prior Beliefs for Argument Persuasion (N18-1)

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Challenge: Recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have shown that the language of opinion holders and their patterns of interaction play a key role in changing the mind of a reader.
Approach: They propose to use a dataset to study the effect of language use vs. prior beliefs on persuasion in a controlled setting that takes into account political and religious ideology.
Outcome: The proposed controlled setting takes into account political and religious ideology and shows that prior beliefs play a more important role than language use effects.

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