Power of Confidence: How Poll Scores Impact Topic Dynamics in Political Debates

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Ashima Arora and Owen Rambow

ACL Workshop on Language Technology and Computational Social Science (ACL LACSS 2014)
Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 26 - 26, 2014

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how topic dynamics during the course of an interaction correlate with the power differences between its participants. We perform this study on the US presidential debates and show that a candidate’s power, modeled after their poll scores, affect how often he/she attempts to shift topics and whether they succeed in it. We ensure the validity of topic shifts by confirming, through a simple but effective method, that the turns that shift topics provide substantial topical content to the interaction.

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