Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates

TL;DR

This paper introduces a methodology to analyze conversational flow in Oxford-style debates, revealing how the strategic use of interactive dialogue influences debate outcomes and winner determination.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for tracking idea flow in debates and demonstrates its effectiveness in understanding factors that determine debate winners.

Findings

Winners actively pursue opponents' points during debates.

Effective use of interactive components correlates with winning.

Conversational flow impacts debate outcomes.

Abstract

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.