Machine Learning Techniques for Persuasion Detection in Conversation

Abstract

We determined that it is possible to automatically detect persuasion in conversations using three traditional machine learning techniques, naive bayes, maximum entropy, and support vector machine. These results are the first of their kind and serve as a baseline for all future work in this field. The three techniques consistently outperformed the baseline F-score, but not at a level that would be useful for real world applications. The corpus of data was comprised of four types of negotiation transcripts, labeled according to a persuasion model developed by James Cialdini. We discovered that the transcripts from the Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas were significantly different from the rest of the corpus. We have included suggestions for future work in the areas of data set improvements, feature set improvements, and additional research. Advancements in this field will contribute to the Global War on Terror by alerting intelligence analysts to enemy persuasion attempts and by enabling U.S. forces to conduct more effective information and psychological operations using local persuasion models.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA524869

Entities

People

  • Pedro Ortiz

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Vision
  • Data Sets
  • Department Of Defense
  • Electronic Mail
  • Experimental Design
  • Feature Extraction
  • Gaussian Distributions
  • Information Operations
  • Information Science
  • Kernel Functions
  • Language
  • Machine Learning
  • Natural Languages
  • Probability
  • Social Norms
  • Supervised Machine Learning

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks