Artificial Intelligence will have a major role in the world of politics after researchers at the Northeastern University in the United States developed a new algorithm that can predict the winner in a political debate.
Professor Lu Wang believes that the right mix of linguistic analysis, artificial intelligence, and data visualization can produce more meaningful debates.
Nick Beauchamp, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern and a collaborator on the project, said: “Debates should be mechanisms for discovering something new about the world. The hope is that you would come away from a debate not with just a set of new facts you learned, but also with a better way of thinking about the problem."
With this goal in mind, Wang and Beauchamp designed an algorithm that identifies features of a strong argument. Using a dataset of 118 Oxford-style debates in which the winner is whomever can sway more of the audience to their side, the algorithm was able to predict debate winners 74 percent of the time, the German News Agency reported.
The model found that winning arguments were characterized by certain linguistic features. For example, the pronouns "we" and "they" were used more often in winning arguments than the pronouns "you" and "I."
Beauchamp noted that debate winners shifted topics strategically to keep the conversation focused on their strongest arguments. Researchers found that strategic topic-shifting was predictive of winning debates. Wang plans to apply the algorithm to debates on social media to better understand how they unfold.
The TechXplorer website cited Beauchamp who said: “The assumption that people want to participate in constructive debates, and not just hurl insults at each other, is optimistic, but having a model of what an ideal debate looks like is essential to shaping such a debate.”
