Argumentation on the Social Web

Use of Logical and Rhetorical Tactics within Eristic Argumentation

Tom Blount, David Millard and Mark Weal

Introduction

Argumentation makes up an important part of human communication
Social argumentation differs from formal argumentation
Current models struggle to capture the social and rhetorical impact of arguments

Problem Space: The Good

Social media is a rich opportunity for analysing "Big" argument structures
Allows us to see how massive communities form and conduct discussions

Problem Space: The Bad

Design of social spaces causing debate to stagnate (e.g. echo-chambers/filter bubbles)
Widespread controversy and abuse (e.g. #GamerGate)
Modelling these problems may help us solve them

Argumentation

Current models focus on formal logic and reasoning
Useful for AI/agent based system
Less useful for modelling human beings

Dialectic/Eristic

Dialectic: Attempting to solve a problem or discover truth
Eristic: Quarrelling to "win"

Logic/Rhetoric

Logic: Using "facts" to draw conclusions
Rhetoric: Using knowledge of the audience

Existing Models: AIF

Argument Interchange Format
Represents argumentation as a directed graph
Aims to link the concepts of natural language argumentation with abstract mathematical modelling

Existing Models: AIF

Existing Models: AIF+

Existing Models: SIOC

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
Cross-platform, cross-service representation of data from the social web
Uses FOAF to link people to their online accounts

Existing Models: SIOC

Example: Attacks

"Alice isn't qualified to make that argument; she doesn't even have a PhD"

Example: Attacks

"Bob doesn't know what he's talking about - he's a ****ing idiot"

Example: Attacks

"**** off and die"

ASWO: Model

Argumentation on the Social Web
Ties together the AIF and SIOC frameworks
Extends these to cover social argumentation

ASWO: Model

ASWO: Model

ASWO: Investigations

Sampled a set of 270 posts from Twitter, Facebook and Reddit
Annotated these posts using AIF/SIOC/ASWO
Examined the use of logical and rhetorical tactics

Rhetoric over time: Twitter

Rhetoric over time: Facebook

Rhetoric over time: Reddit

Rhetoric per user: Twitter

Rhetoric per user: Facebook

Rhetoric per user: Reddit

ASWO: Analysis

Even a subset of social/rhetorical tactics are prevalent in online argumentation
May be possible to draw some correlations between post content and tactics

Future work

Introduce further ASWO extensions
Examine distribution of rhetorical tactics on different social media platforms
Examine how different tactics alter a user's perception of the argument as a whole

Conclusion

Current models of argumentation do not capture rhetorical force or social impact
Social media is an excellent opportunity to analyse argumentation on a large scale
The social (and anti-social) aspects of argumentation cannot and should not be ignored

Questions?

Tom Blount - tb12g09@ecs.soton.ac.uk - @Tom_Blount

References

Breslin, J. G., Decker, S., Harth, A., and Bojars, U. (2006). SIOC: an approach to connect web-based communities. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2(2):133–142.

Chesñevar, C., McGinnis, J., Modgil, S., Rahwan, I., Reed, C., Simari, G., South, M., Vreeswijk, G., andWillmott, S. (2006). Towards an argument interchange format. Knowledge Engineering Review, 21(4):293–316.

Gilbert, E., Bergstrom, T., and Karahalios, K. (2009). Blogs are echo chambers: Blogs are echo chambers. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS’09, pages 1–10. IEEE.

Jane, E. A. (2014). "Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut" Understanding E-bile. Feminist Media Studies, 14(4):531–546.

Kerferd, G. B. (1981). The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge University Press.