# Winning on the Merits: The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes

## TL;DR

This paper presents a predictive model that combines content and style features to determine debate winners, demonstrating that stronger arguments and linguistic cues significantly influence debate outcomes.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel model integrating content and style to predict debate results, outperforming models based solely on linguistic features.

## Key findings

- Model predicts debate winners with 74% accuracy
- Content and style features jointly improve prediction performance
- Linguistic features correlate with argument strength

## Abstract

Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which side has the stronger arguments. We propose a predictive model of debate that estimates the effects of linguistic features and the latent persuasive strengths of different topics, as well as the interactions between the two. Using a dataset of 118 Oxford-style debates, our model's combination of content (as latent topics) and style (as linguistic features) allows us to predict audience-adjudicated winners with 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming linguistic features alone (66%). Our model finds that winning sides employ stronger arguments, and allows us to identify the linguistic features associated with strong or weak arguments.