A study of the impact of persuasive argumentation in political debates

Persuasive communication is the process of shaping, reinforcing and changing others' responses. In political debates, speakers express their views towards the debated topics by choosing both the content of their discourse and the argumentation process. In this work we study the use of semantic frames for modelling argumentation in speakers' discourse. We investigate the impact of a speaker's argumentation style and their effect in influencing an audience in supporting their candidature. We model the influence index of each candidate based on their relative standings in the polls released prior to the debate and present a system which ranks speakers in terms of their relative influence using a combination of content and persuasive argumentation features. Our results show that although content alone is predictive of a speaker's influence rank, persuasive argumentation also affects such indices.