Is This Post Persuasive? Ranking Argumentative Comments in Online Forum

In this paper we study how to identify persuasive posts in the online forum discussions, using data from Change My View sub-Reddit. Our analysis confirms that the users’ voting score for a comment is highly correlated with its metadata information such as published time and author reputation. In this work, we propose and evaluate other features to rank comments for their persuasive scores, including textual information in the comments and social interaction related features. Our experiments show that the surface textual features do not perform well compared to the argumentation based features, and the social interaction based features are effective especially when more users participate in the discussion.