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Ethos and Pathos in Online Group Discussions: Corpora for Polarisation Issues in Social Media

Ewelina Gajewska, Katarzyna Budzynska, Barbara Konat, Marcin Koszowy, Konrad Kiljan, Maciej Uberna, He Zhang

TL;DR

This work addresses the rising polarisation in online discussions by operationalising Aristotelian ethos and pathos as annotation targets in large, multi-topic, multi-platform corpora (PolarIs). It provides 15,588 sentences across three polarising topics collected from Reddit and Twitter, with dedicated annotation schemes for ethos and pathos as well as reported speech, enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses of persuasion patterns. The findings show higher density of pathos than ethos and distinct topic- and platform-specific tendencies (e.g., Reddit with more ethos praising and Twitter with more positive pathos), illustrating universal and contextual aspects of polarisation. By facilitating large-scale modeling and integration with existing hate-speech and sentiment analyses, PolarIs offers a valuable resource for studying hearer-oriented persuasion and informing interventions to mitigate online polarisation.

Abstract

Growing polarisation in society caught the attention of the scientific community as well as news media, which devote special issues to this phenomenon. At the same time, digitalisation of social interactions requires to revise concepts from social science regarding establishment of trust, which is a key feature of all human interactions, and group polarisation, as well as new computational tools to process large quantities of available data. Existing methods seem insufficient to tackle the problem fully, thus, we propose to approach the problem by investigating rhetorical strategies employed by individuals in polarising discussions online. To this end, we develop multi-topic and multi-platform corpora with manual annotation of appeals to ethos and pathos, two modes of persuasion in Aristotelian rhetoric. It can be employed for training language models to advance the study of communication strategies online on a large scale. With the use of computational methods, our corpora allows an investigation of recurring patterns in polarising exchanges across topics of discussion and media platforms, and conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses of language structures leading to and engaged in polarisation.

Ethos and Pathos in Online Group Discussions: Corpora for Polarisation Issues in Social Media

TL;DR

This work addresses the rising polarisation in online discussions by operationalising Aristotelian ethos and pathos as annotation targets in large, multi-topic, multi-platform corpora (PolarIs). It provides 15,588 sentences across three polarising topics collected from Reddit and Twitter, with dedicated annotation schemes for ethos and pathos as well as reported speech, enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses of persuasion patterns. The findings show higher density of pathos than ethos and distinct topic- and platform-specific tendencies (e.g., Reddit with more ethos praising and Twitter with more positive pathos), illustrating universal and contextual aspects of polarisation. By facilitating large-scale modeling and integration with existing hate-speech and sentiment analyses, PolarIs offers a valuable resource for studying hearer-oriented persuasion and informing interventions to mitigate online polarisation.

Abstract

Growing polarisation in society caught the attention of the scientific community as well as news media, which devote special issues to this phenomenon. At the same time, digitalisation of social interactions requires to revise concepts from social science regarding establishment of trust, which is a key feature of all human interactions, and group polarisation, as well as new computational tools to process large quantities of available data. Existing methods seem insufficient to tackle the problem fully, thus, we propose to approach the problem by investigating rhetorical strategies employed by individuals in polarising discussions online. To this end, we develop multi-topic and multi-platform corpora with manual annotation of appeals to ethos and pathos, two modes of persuasion in Aristotelian rhetoric. It can be employed for training language models to advance the study of communication strategies online on a large scale. With the use of computational methods, our corpora allows an investigation of recurring patterns in polarising exchanges across topics of discussion and media platforms, and conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses of language structures leading to and engaged in polarisation.
Paper Structure (16 sections, 4 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 16 sections, 4 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Data Collection
  3. Related Work
  4. Ethos on Social Media
  5. Annotation scheme.
  6. Results.
  7. Inter-annotator agreement.
  8. Error analysis.
  9. Pathos on Social Media
  10. Annotation scheme.
  11. Results.
  12. Inter-annotator agreement.
  13. Error analysis.
  14. Polarisation Issues
  15. Conclusions
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Our approach to the study of polarisation in group discussions using rhetorical strategies of appealing to ethos and pathos. Appealing to ethos is marked by a silhouette with a raised hand and a silhouette with a downward head tilt in cases of support and attack, respectively. Pathos is illustrated with the use of face emojis with either a positive (a smiling face) or negative (an angry face) expression.
  • Figure 2: Percentage distribution (%) of subcorpora size.
  • Figure 3: Negative versus positive categories of ethos and pathos appeals across topics of discussion. Ethos is presented at the top, and pathos at the bottom.
  • Figure 4: Negative versus positive appeals to ethos and pathos across social media platforms of Reddit and Twitter.