what aspects of conversation flow do they look at?
The time devoted to self-coverage, opponent-coverage, and the number of adopted discussion points.
Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a case study of Oxford-style debates---a competitive format where the winner is determined by audience votes---and show how the outcome of a debate depends on aspects of conversational flow. In particular, we find that winners tend to make better use of a debate's interactive component than losers, by actively pursuing their opponents' points rather than promoting their own ideas over the course of the conversation.
Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging viewpoints As opposed to monologues where speakers are limited to expressing their own beliefs, debates allow for participants to interactively attack their opponents' points while defending their own. The resulting flow of ideas is a key feature of this conversation genre. In this work we introduce a computational framework for characterizing debates in terms of conversational flow. This framework captures two main debating strategies—promoting one's own points and attacking the opponents' points—and tracks their relative usage throughout the debate. By applying this methodology to a setting where debate winners are known, we show that conversational flow patterns are predictive of which debater is more likely to persuade an audience. Case study: Oxford-style debates. Oxford-style debates provide a setting that is particularly convenient for studying the effects of conversational flow. In this competitive debate format, two teams argue for or against a preset motion in order to persuade a live audience to take their position. The audience votes before and after the debate, and the winning team is the one that sways more of the audience towards its view. This setup allows us to focus on the effects of conversational flow since it disentangles them from the audience's prior leaning. The debate format involves an opening statement from the two sides, which presents an overview of their arguments before the discussion begins. This allows us to easily identify talking points held by the participants prior to the interaction, and consider them separately from points introduced spontaneously to serve the discussion. This work is taking steps towards better modeling of conversational dynamics, by: (i) introducing a debate dataset with rich metadata (Section SECREF2 ), (ii) proposing a framework for tracking the flow of ideas (Section SECREF3 ), and (iii) showing its effectiveness in a predictive setting (Section SECREF4 ).