This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists and a computational system that tries to learn from these annotations.
Pranav Anand is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCSC.