And That's A Fact: Distinguishing Factual and Emotional Argumentation in Online Dialogue

TL;DR

This paper analyzes linguistic patterns distinguishing factual from emotional argumentation in online debates, using annotated data and bootstrapping to identify key expressions and characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a bootstrapping methodology to automatically discover linguistic patterns associated with factual and emotional arguments in online dialogue.

Findings

Identified patterns highly correlated with factual arguments

Identified patterns highly correlated with emotional arguments

Provided insights into linguistic features of online argumentation

Abstract

We investigate the characteristics of factual and emotional argumentation styles observed in online debates. Using an annotated set of "factual" and "feeling" debate forum posts, we extract patterns that are highly correlated with factual and emotional arguments, and then apply a bootstrapping methodology to find new patterns in a larger pool of unannotated forum posts. This process automatically produces a large set of patterns representing linguistic expressions that are highly correlated with factual and emotional language. Finally, we analyze the most discriminating patterns to better understand the defining characteristics of factual and emotional arguments.