Publication Details

Analyzing the Persuasive Effect of Style in News Editorial Argumentation

authored by
Roxanne El Baff, Henning Wachsmuth, Khalid Al-Khatib, Benno Stein
Abstract

News editorials argue about political issues in order to challenge or reinforce the stance of readers with different ideologies. Previous research has investigated such persuasive effects for argumentative content. In contrast, this paper studies how important the style of news editorials is to achieve persuasion. To this end, we first compare content- and style-oriented classifiers on editorials from the liberal NYTimes with ideology-specific effect annotations. We find that conservative readers are resistant to NYTimes style, but on liberals, style even has more impact than content. Focusing on liberals, we then cluster the leads, bodies, and endings of editorials, in order to learn about writing style patterns of effective argumentation.

External Organisation(s)
DLR-Institute of Aeroelastics
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Paderborn University
Type
Conference contribution
Pages
3154-3160
No. of pages
7
Publication date
07.2020
Publication status
Published
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Language and Linguistics, Computer Science Applications, Linguistics and Language
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.287 (Access: Open)