@inproceedings{falenska-etal-2024-self,
    title = "Self-reported Demographics and Discourse Dynamics in a Persuasive Online Forum",
    author = "Falenska, Agnieszka  and
      Vecchi, Eva Maria  and
      Lapesa, Gabriella",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1272",
    pages = "14606--14621",
    abstract = "Research on language as interactive discourse underscores the deliberate use of demographic parameters such as gender, ethnicity, and class to shape social identities. For example, by explicitly disclosing one{'}s information and enforcing one{'}s social identity to an online community, the reception by and interaction with the said community is impacted, e.g., strengthening one{'}s opinions by depicting the speaker as credible through their experience in the subject. Here, we present a first thorough study of the role and effects of self-disclosures on online discourse dynamics, focusing on a pervasive type of self-disclosure: author gender. Concretely, we investigate the contexts and properties of gender self-disclosures and their impact on interaction dynamics in an online persuasive forum, ChangeMyView. Our contribution is twofold. At the level of the target phenomenon, we fill a research gap in the understanding of the impact of these self-disclosures on the discourse by bringing together features related to forum activity (votes, number of comments), linguistic/stylistic features from the literature, and discourse topics. At the level of the contributed resource, we enrich and release a comprehensive dataset that will provide a further impulse for research on the interplay between gender disclosures, community interaction, and persuasion in online discourse.",
}

Research on language as interactive discourse underscores the deliberate use of demographic parameters such as gender, ethnicity, and class to shape social identities. For example, by explicitly disclosing one{'}s information and enforcing one{'}s social identity to an online community, the reception by and interaction with the said community is impacted, e.g., strengthening one{'}s opinions by depicting the speaker as credible through their experience in the subject. Here, we present a first thorough study of the role and effects of self-disclosures on online discourse dynamics, focusing on a pervasive type of self-disclosure: author gender. Concretely, we investigate the contexts and properties of gender self-disclosures and their impact on interaction dynamics in an online persuasive forum, ChangeMyView. Our contribution is twofold. At the level of the target phenomenon, we fill a research gap in the understanding of the impact of these self-disclosures on the discourse by bringing together features related to forum activity (votes, number of comments), linguistic/stylistic features from the literature, and discourse topics. At the level of the contributed resource, we enrich and release a comprehensive dataset that will provide a further impulse for research on the interplay between gender disclosures, community interaction, and persuasion in online discourse.
Falenska, Agnieszka Vecchi, Eva Maria Lapesa, Gabriella
Self-reported Demographics and Discourse Dynamics in a Persuasive Online Forum