{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Estimating Causal Effects of Tone in Online Debates","authors":[{"name":"Dhanya Sridhar","slug":"dhanya-sridhar","given":"Dhanya","family":"Sridhar","affiliation":"Columbia University"},{"name":"Lise Getoor","slug":"lise-getoor","given":"Lise","family":"Getoor","affiliation":"UC Santa Cruz"}],"abstract":"Statistical methods applied to social media posts shed light on the dynamics of online dialogue. For example, users' wording choices predict their persuasiveness and users adopt the language patterns of other dialogue participants. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of reply tones in debates on linguistic and sentiment changes in subsequent responses. The challenge for this estimation is that a reply's tone and subsequent responses are confounded by the users' ideologies on the debate topic and their emotions. To overcome this challenge, we learn representations of ideology using generative models of text. We study debates from 4Forums.com and compare annotated tones of replying such as emotional versus factual, or reasonable versus attacking. We show that our latent confounder representation reduces bias in ATE estimation. Our results suggest that factual and asserting tones affect dialogue and provide a methodology for estimating causal effects from text.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2019/259","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2019/259","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2019/0259.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2019/259.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2019/bibtex/259","volume":{"slug":"2019","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2019","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2019/","year":2019,"location":"Macao","dates":"10-16 August 2019","editors":"Sarit Kraus","isbn":"978-0-9992411-4-1","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2019"},"section":"Knowledge Representation and Reasoning","track":"Main track","number":259,"pages":{"first":1872,"last":1878},"keywords":["Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality","Natural Language Processing: NLP Applications and Tools","Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Social Sciences"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Abbott et al., 2011] Rob Abbott, Marilyn Walker, Jean E. 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