This paper addresses the task of measuring Twitter social attributes that can be used for detecting patterns that show user participation in public debates in South African. We propose a method that leverages observable information on Twitter such as use of language, retweeting user behaviour, and the relationship between topics and the user social network graph. Our experimental results sugges...

Determining the stance expressed in a post written for a two-sided debate in an online debate forum is a relatively new and challenging problem in opinion mining. We seek to gain a better understanding of how to improve machine learning approaches to stance classification of ideological debates, specifically by examining how the performance of a learning-based stance classification system varie...

In sizing up the notion of public memory, rhetoricians would be remiss not to consider the increasing influence of new media on today’s remembrance culture. This article addresses memorial functions of the internet in light of recent scholarly debates about virtues and drawbacks of modern ‘‘archival memory’’ as well as the paradoxical link between the contemporary public obsession with memory a...

In this paper, we present a corpus of news blog conversations in Italian annotated with gold standard agreement/disagreement relations at message and sentence levels. This is the first resource of this kind in Italian. From the analysis of ADRs at the two levels emerged that agreement annotated at message level is consistent and generally reflected at sentence level, and that the structure of d...

Probabilistically checkable debate systems (PCDSs) are debates between two competing provers, in which a polynomial-time verifier inspects a constant number of bits of the debate. It was shown by Condon, Feigenbaum, Lund, and Shor that every language in PSPACE has a PCDS in which the debate length is polynomially bounded. Using this result, they showed that the approximation versions of some na...

The paper analyzes the signals of dominance in different modalities displayed during TV talk shows and debates. Dominance is defined, according to a model in terms of goals and beliefs, as a person’s having more power than others. A scheme is presented for the annotation of signals of dominance in political debates: based on the analysis of videotaped data, a typology is proposed of strategies ...

In anticipation of the US Presidential debate on Monday, September 26, 2016, let’s look at a mathematical model for debates, developed by Dickson, Hafer and Landa [1]. We begin by asking what is the purpose of debates? From the point of view of each candidate, it is, of course, to convince listeners to vote for him/her. Thus we should concentrate on listeners who have not yet decided for whom t...

Many r u l e s of fo rma l debate are w e l l documented, of common knowledge, and " l ooked -up " in p r e p a r a t i o n f o r planned deba t i ng . I n f o r m a l debates, on the o ther hand, are h i g h l y dynamic, are complex, and are spontaneously generated w i t h no p r i o r r u l e -book p r e p a r a t i o n . They t o o , however, are r u l e g o v e r n e d . In t h i s paper I ...

The controversies and theological debates between different religions have always been an interesting topic for the scholars of religion. These debates were usually carried out in two ways: orally, in a meeting dedicated to these debates, or in writing. One of the religious traditions criticized since its emergence and against which many refutations were written in the early Islamic centu...

Administrations increasingly use the internet to improve citizens’ participation in political processes. While research on online political communication and e-democracy is growing, we still have little empirical evidence on the quality of online participation and deliberation processes. This paper focuses on an online local deliberation process, the 2011 Zurich City Debate, and seeks to invest...