Public debate forums provide a common platform for exchanging opinions on a topic of interest. While recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have provided empirical evidence that the language of the debaters and their patterns of interaction play a key role in changing the mind of a reader, research in psychology has shown that prior beliefs can affect our interpretation of an argument and could therefore constitute a competing alternative explanation for resistance to changing one's stance. To study the actual effect of language use vs. prior beliefs on persuasion, we provide a new dataset and propose a controlled setting that takes into consideration two reader level factors: political and religious ideology. We find that prior beliefs affected by these reader level factors play a more important role than language use effects and argue that it is important to account for them in NLP studies of persuasion.

论文探究公共辩论论坛上通过自然语言处理实证证据表明辩手的语言和互动方式在改变读者立场方面起关键作用与心理学研究表明先前信念可能影响我们对论点的解释并可能构成竞争替代解释以研究语言运用与先前信念对说服力的实际影响，我们提供了一个新数据集并提出一种控制环境，在此考虑了两个读者层次因素：政治和宗教意识形态。我们发现，这些读者层面因素所受的先前信念的影响比语言使用效应更为重要，并认为在自然语言处理说服力研究中重要性不言自明。

探索先有信念在论证说服中的作用