Agreement: How to Reach it? Defining Language Features Leading to Agreement in Discourse

Abstract

Consensus is the desired result in many argumentative discourses such as negotiations, public debates, and goal-oriented forums. However, due to the fact that usually people are poor arguers, a support of argumentation is necessary. Web-2 provides means for the online discussions which have their characteristic features. In our paper we study the features of discourse which lead to agreement. We use an argumentative corpus of Wikipedia discussions in order to investigate the influence of discourse structure and language on the final agreement. The corpus had been annotated with rhetorical relations and rhetorical structures leading to successful and unsuccessful discussions were analyzed. We also investigated language patterns extracted from the corpus in order to discover which ones are indicators of the following agreement. The results of our study can be used in system designing, whose purpose is to assist on-line interlocutors in consensus building.