Let's Make Your Request More Persuasive: Modeling Persuasive Strategies via Semi-Supervised Neural Nets on Crowdfunding Platforms
Modeling what makes a request persuasive - eliciting the desired response from a reader - is critical to the study of propaganda, behavioral economics, and advertising. Yet current models can{'}t quantify the persuasiveness of requests or extract successful persuasive strategies. Building on theories of persuasion, we propose a neural network to quantify persuasiveness and identify the persuasive strategies in advocacy requests. Our semi-supervised hierarchical neural network model is supervised by the number of people persuaded to take actions and partially supervised at the sentence level with human-labeled rhetorical strategies. Our method outperforms several baselines, uncovers persuasive strategies - offering increased interpretability of persuasive speech - and has applications for other situations with document-level supervision but only partial sentence supervision.
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