How can we capture the dynamics of deliberation in a debate? In an increasingly divided and misinformed world, understanding the relationship between who is arguing and what they are arguing about is becoming critical for fostering a meaningful exchange of ideas. Given the vast array of available platforms for people to express their viewpoints and deliberate on issues, how can we develop methods to accurately analyze these processes? Luckily, there is an abundance of debate data available, ranging from: (a) formal proceedings, such as committee hearings in legislatures, to (b) online discussion forums, such as Reddit. Here we introduce DALiSM, a data-driven argument-centric framework, to analyze discourse dynamics in diverse and multi-party spaces at scale. We develop methods to harness and extend the state-of-the-art in computational argumentation for: (a) identifying arguments from long-form raw texts, (b) calculating the intensity of deliberation, and (c) modeling the evolution of discourse over time. We deploy our framework as a comprehensive and interactive dashboard for dynamically viewing the outputs of DALiSM to clearly understand the nature of a discourse event. To showcase the importance and utility of DALiSM, we apply our framework to U.S. congressional committee hearings from 2005 to 2023 (109th to 117th Congresses), and to selected Reddit communities from 2008 to 2023. This case study reveals substantive insights into deliberative behavior in online and offline spaces.
Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences（GESIS – 莱布尼茨社会科学研究所）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
The Brazilian Vaccination Debate on YouTube: Topics, Perspectives, and Engagement Dynamics
Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto（欧罗普雷托联邦大学）；ISTI, National Research Council (CNR)（意大利国家研究委员会IST研究所）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）；Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）
The Truth Becomes Clearer Through Debate! Multi-Agent Systems with Large Language Models Unmask Fake News
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（仁爱大学人工智能学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Fine-Grained Detection of Solidarity for Women and Migrants in 155 Years of German Parliamentary Debates
Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hans-Bredow-Institut（汉斯·布雷多研究所）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
