Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a case study of Oxford-style debates---a competitive format where the winner is determined by audience votes---and show how the outcome of a debate depends on aspects of conversational flow. In particular, we find that winners tend to make better use of a debate's interactive component than losers, by actively pursuing their opponents' points rather than promoting their own ideas over the course of the conversation.
Entries in the burgeoning “text-as-data” movement are often accompanied by lists or visualizations of how word (or other lexical feature) usage differs across some pair or set of documents. These are intended either to establish some target semantic concept (like the content of partisan frames) to estimate word-specific measures that feed forward into another analysis (like locating parties in ideological space) or both. We discuss a variety of techniques for selecting words that capture partisan, or other, differences in political speech and for evaluating the relative importance of those words. We introduce and emphasize several new approaches based on Bayesian shrinkage and regularization. We illustrate the relative utility of these approaches with analyses of partisan, gender, and distributive speech in the U.S. Senate. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in stance classification in online debates. Oftentimes, however, it is important to determine not only the stance expressed by an author in her debate posts, but also the reasons behind her supporting or opposing the issue under debate. We therefore examine the new task of reason classification in this paper. Given the close interplay between stance classification and reason classification, we design computational models for examining how automatically computed stance information can be profitably exploited for reason classification. Experiments on our reason-annotated corpus of ideological debate posts from four domains demonstrate that sophisticated models of stances and reasons can indeed yield more accurate reason and stance classification results than their simpler counterparts. In this paper we investigate the effect of the context of interaction on the extent to which a contributor's perspective bias is displayed through their lexical choice. We present a series of experiments on political discussion data. Our experiments indicate that (i) when people quote contributors with an opposing view, they tend to quote the words that are less strongly associated with the opposing view. (ii) Nevertheless, in quoting their opponents, the displayed bias of their word distributions shifts towards that of their opponents. (iii) The personal bias of the speaker is displayed most clearly through the words that are not quoted, (iv) although characteristics of the quoted message do have a measurable effect on the words that are included in the contribution. And, finally, (v) posts are influenced by the displayed bias of previous posts in a thread. We investigate the novel task of online dispute detection and propose a sentiment analysis solution to the problem: we aim to identify the sequence of sentence-level sentiments expressed during a discussion and to use them as features in a classifier that predicts the DISPUTE NON-DISPUTE label for the discussion as a whole. We evaluate dispute detection approaches on a newly created corpus of Wikipedia Talk page disputes and find that classifiers that rely on our sentiment tagging features outperform those that do not. The best model achieves a very promising F1 score of 0.78 and an accuracy of 0.80. Determining when conversational participants agree or disagree is instrumental for broader conversational analysis; it is necessary, for example, in deciding when a group has reached consensus. In this paper, we describe three main contributions. We show how different aspects of conversational structure can be used to detect agreement and disagreement in discussion forums. In particular, we exploit information about meta-thread structure and accommodation between participants. Second, we demonstrate the impact of the features using 3-way classification, including sentences expressing disagreement, agreement or neither. Finally, we show how to use a naturally occurring data set with labels derived from the sides that participants choose in debates on createdebate.com. The resulting new agreement corpus, Agreement by Create Debaters (ABCD) is 25 times larger than any prior corpus. We demonstrate that using this data enables us to outperform the same system trained on prior existing in-domain smaller annotated datasets.  Interpersonal relations are fickle, with close friendships often dissolving into enmity. In this work, we explore linguistic cues that presage such transitions by studying dyadic interactions in an online strategy game where players form alliances and break those alliances through betrayal. We characterize friendships that are unlikely to last and examine temporal patterns that foretell betrayal. We reveal that subtle signs of imminent betrayal are encoded in the conversational patterns of the dyad, even if the victim is not aware of the relationship's fate. In particular, we find that lasting friendships exhibit a form of balance that manifests itself through language. In contrast, sudden changes in the balance of certain conversational attributes---such as positive sentiment, politeness, or focus on future planning---signal impending betrayal. For the task of recognizing dialogue acts, we are applying the Transformation-Based Learning (TBL) machine learning algorithm. To circumvent a sparse data problem, we extract values of well-motivated features of utterances, such as speaker direction, punctuation marks, and a new feature, called dialogue act cues, which we find to be more effective than cue phrases and word n-grams in practice. We present strategies for constructing a set of dialogue act cues automatically by minimizing the entropy of the distribution of dialogue acts in a training corpus, filtering out irrelevant dialogue act cues, and clustering semantically-related words. In addition, to address limitations of TBL, we introduce a Monte Carlo strategy for training efficiently and a committee method for computing confidence measures. These ideas are combined in our working implementation, which labels held-out data as accurately as any other reported system for the dialogue act tagging task. In this paper, we propose an annotation schema for the discourse analysis of Wikipedia Talk pages aimed at the coordination efforts for article improvement. We apply the annotation schema to a corpus of 100 Talk pages from the Simple English Wikipedia and make the resulting dataset freely available for download. Furthermore, we perform automatic dialog act classification on Wikipedia discussions and achieve an average F1-score of 0.82 with our classification pipeline. We evaluate several popular models of local discourse coherence for domain and task generality by applying them to chat disentanglement. Using experiments on synthetic multiparty conversations, we show that most models transfer well from text to dialogue. Coherence models improve results overall when good parses and topic models are available, and on a constrained task for real chat data. Casual online forums such as Reddit, Slashdot and Digg, are continuing to increase in popularity as a means of communication. Detecting disagreement in this domain is a considerable challenge. Many topics are unique to the conversation on the forum, and the appearance of disagreement may be much more subtle than on political blogs or social media sites such as twitter. In this analysis we present a crowd-sourced annotated corpus for topic level disagreement detection in Slashdot, showing that disagreement detection in this domain is difficult even for humans. We then proceed to show that a new set of features determined from the rhetorical structure of the conversation significantly improves the performance on disagreement detection over a baseline consisting of unigram bigram features, discourse markers, structural features and meta-post features. We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the fact that these speeches occur as part of a discussion; this allows us to use sources of information regarding relationships between discourse segments, such as whether a given utterance indicates agreement with the opinion expressed by another. We find that the incorporation of such information yields substantial improvements over classifying speeches in isolation. Online debate forums present a valuable opportunity for the understanding and modeling of dialogue. To understand these debates, a key challenge is inferring the stances of the participants, all of which are interrelated and dependent. While collectively modeling users’ stances has been shown to be effective (, 2012c; Hasan and Ng, 2013), there are many modeling decisions whose ramifications are not well understood. To investigate these choices and their effects, we introduce a scalable unified probabilistic modeling framework for stance classification models that 1) are collective, 2) reason about disagreement, and 3) can model stance at either the author level or at the post level. We comprehensively evaluate the possible modeling choices on eight topics across two online debate corpora, finding accuracy improvements of up to 11.5 percentage points over a local classifier. Our results highlight the importance of making the correct modeling choices for online dialogues, and having a unified probabilistic modeling framework that makes this possible. This work explores the utility of sentiment and arguing opinions for classifying stances in ideological debates. In order to capture arguing opinions in ideological stance taking, we construct an arguing lexicon automatically from a manually annotated corpus. We build supervised systems employing sentiment and arguing opinions and their targets as features. Our systems perform substantially better than a distribution-based baseline. Additionally, by employing both types of opinion features, we are able to perform better than a unigram-based system. We propose the first unsupervised approach to the problem of modeling dialogue acts in an open domain. Trained on a corpus of noisy Twitter conversations, our method discovers dialogue acts by clustering raw utterances. Because it accounts for the sequential behaviour of these acts, the learned model can provide insight into the shape of communication in a new medium. We address the challenge of evaluating the emergent model with a qualitative visualization and an intrinsic conversation ordering task. This work is inspired by a corpus of 1.3 million Twitter conversations, which will be made publicly available. This huge amount of data, available only because Twitter blurs the line between chatting and publishing, highlights the need to be able to adapt quickly to a new medium.