The Moral Debater

A Study on the Computational Generation of Morally Framed Arguments

authored by

Milad Alshomary, Roxanne El Baff, Timon Gurcke, Henning Wachsmuth

Abstract

An audience's prior beliefs and morals are strong indicators of how likely they will be affected by a given argument. Utilizing such knowledge can help focus on shared values to bring disagreeing parties towards agreement. In argumentation technology, however, this is barely exploited so far. This paper studies the feasibility of automatically generating morally framed arguments as well as their effect on different audiences. Following the moral foundation theory, we propose a system that effectively generates arguments focusing on different morals. In an in-depth user study, we ask liberals and conservatives to evaluate the impact of these arguments. Our results suggest that, particularly when prior beliefs are challenged, an audience becomes more affected by morally framed arguments.

External Organisation(s)

Paderborn University
DLR-Institute of Aeroelastics

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

8782 - 8797

No. of pages

16

Publication date

05.2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science Applications, Linguistics and Language, Language and Linguistics

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.14563 (Access: Open)
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.601 (Access: Open)