Persuasive language and features of formality on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daria Dayter ◽  
Thomas C. Messerli
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Formal Language ◽  
Systematic Variation ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Similar Frequency ◽  
Persuasive Discourse ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
N Gram

Abstract The paper investigates formal language in persuasive discourse on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit. We collected a corpus of 100 million messages, split into subcorpora based on the user-awarded marker delta, which rewards changing an original poster’s view. Assuming that formality/informality is potentially an important factor in the persuasiveness of a message, we examine the two subcorpora with respect to formality markers. The results indicate no systematic variation along the formality/informality continuum between persuasive and non-persuasive posts on r/ChangeMyView. The posters use personal pronouns, suasive verbs, emphatics, imperatives, elaborate connectors and WH-questions with similar frequency, and express themselves using vocabulary and syntax of similar complexity. Moreover, keyword lists and n-gram rankings indicate no register difference. A qualitative analysis of concordance lines for persuade and change PRONOUN view paints a picture of a community that values factual, evidence-based discourse and openness to logical persuasion, with a linguistic norm of relatively formal, sophisticated register.

The Experience of Implementing Evidence-Based Practice Change: A Qualitative Analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 544-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Irwin ◽  
Rosalie M. Bergman ◽  
Rebecca Richards
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Evidence Based Practice ◽  
Practice Change ◽  
Evidence Based

scholarly journals Den intima ledaren?: Om ledarartiklar, informalisering och språklig förändring

2019 ◽  
Vol NF 28 (2018) ◽  
pp. 78-111
Author(s):  
Sanna Skärlund
Keyword(s):  
Formal Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Public Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Time Period

Public language is generally considered to have become more informal in the Western world in the past few decades. The same holds true for Swedish public language and the language of Swedish newspapers in particular. However, two former studies of opinion articles in five Swedish newspapers revealed that the language used in this genre was surprisingly unchanged during the time period 1945–2000. This article replicates the two former studies by analysing 36 Swedish opinion articles from 2015 from a quantitative perspective. The results of the analysis are then compared to those of the earlier studies to see if, and to what extent, tendencies of informalization have now become noticeable in the opinion articles. It is demonstrated that there are indeed signs of informalization in the articles from 2015. Words and sentences have become shorter, colloquial expressions (such as swear words) are used, and both incomplete sentences and personal pronouns in first and second person are more frequent than before. On the other hand, subordinate clauses are more common in the articles from 2015 than in 1985–2000. Since subordinate clauses in former studies of Swedish have been considered a formal trait, this is quite unexpected. In the article, it is argued that the connection between subordination and formal language is more complex than has sometimes previously been acknowledged –, and that subordinate clauses have different functions, not all of them characterizing a formal style.

A qualitative analysis of school psychology trainers’ perspectives on evidence-based practices

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jorge E. Gonzalez ◽  
Karen C. Stoiber ◽  
Rebecca J. Clayton ◽  
Milena Keller-Margulis ◽  
Linda A. Reddy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
School Psychology ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Evidence Based Practices

Identifying key sociophilological usage in plays and trial proceedings (1640–1760)

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Archer ◽  
Jonathan Culpeper
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Corpus Annotation ◽  
Personal Pronouns

In this paper, we argue that there is another approach to the study of historical pragmatics beyond those explicitly mentioned in Jacobs and Jucker (1995). We label this approach “sociophilology”. Moreover, we demonstrate how this approach can be effectively pursued by combining two corpus linguistics techniques: corpus annotation and “keyness” analysis. Specifically, we draw from the Sociopragmatic Corpus (1640–1760), an annotated subsection of comedy plays and drama proceedings taken from the Corpus of Dialogues 1560–1760, as a means of identifying the statistically-based style markers, or key items, associated with a number of social role dyads (including examiner to examinee and master/mistress to servant). We will show how such an approach might be used to uncover differential distributions of personal pronouns, interjections, imperative verbs, politeness formulae, etc., and how, by combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis, one can scrutinise such material for pragmatic import.

scholarly journals Youth and Provider Perspectives on Behavior-Tracking Mobile Apps: Qualitative Analysis (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney C Armstrong ◽  
Erica J Odukoya ◽  
Keerthi Sundaramurthy ◽  
Sabrina M Darrow
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Mobile Health ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Clinical Care ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Provider Perspectives ◽  
Behavior Tracking

BACKGROUND Mobile health apps stand as one possible means of improving evidence-based mental health interventions for youth. However, a better understanding of youth and provider perspectives is necessary to support widespread implementation. OBJECTIVE The objective of this research was to explore both youth and provider perspectives on using mobile apps to enhance evidence-based clinical care, with an emphasis on gathering perspectives on behavior-tracking apps. METHODS Inductive qualitative analysis was conducted on data obtained from semistructured interviews held with 10 youths who received psychotherapy and 12 mental health care providers who conducted therapy with youths aged 13-26 years. Interviews were independently coded by multiple coders and consensus meetings were held to establish reliability. RESULTS During the interviews, the youths and providers broadly agreed on the benefits of behavior tracking and believed that tracking via app could be more enjoyable and accessible. Providers and youths also shared similar concerns that negative emotions and user burden could limit app usage. Participants also suggested potential app features that, if implemented, would help meet the clinical needs of providers and support long-term use among youth. Such features included having a pleasant user interface, reminders for clients, and graphical output of data to clients and providers. CONCLUSIONS Youths and providers explained that the integration of mobile health into psychotherapy has the potential to make treatment, particularly behavior tracking, easy and more accessible. However, both groups had concerns about the increased burden that could be placed on the clients and providers.

scholarly journals Leading Change and Advancing Health by Enhancing Nurses' and Midwives' Knowledge, Ability and Confidence to Conduct Research through a Clinical Scholar Program in Western Australia

ISRN Nursing ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose Chapman ◽  
Ravani Duggan ◽  
Shane Combs
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Western Australia ◽  
Evidence Based Practice ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Leading Change ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Anonymous Questionnaire ◽  
Nurses And Midwives

This paper reports on an evaluation of a Clinical Scholar Program initiated at a hospital in Western Australia. The aim of the program was to build the capacity of nurses and midwives to conduct research and evidence-based practice within the hospital. The program was based on a previous program and consisted of six teaching days and four hours per month release for proposal preparation. At the end of the program participants were asked to complete a short anonymous questionnaire. The answers were analysed using standard processes of qualitative analysis. Themes emerging from the data included program strengths, individual gains, ability to conduct research, and areas for improvement. The findings highlighted that, while the participants considered that they were more knowledgeable and confident to conduct research, they still required support. The Clinical Scholar Program has provided a way to increase the capacity of clinicians to participate in research activities.

scholarly journals Semantic Deep Learning: Prior Knowledge and a Type of Four-Term Embedding Analogy to Acquire Treatments for Well-Known Diseases (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro ◽  
Julio Des Diz ◽  
Nava Maroto ◽  
Maria Jesus Fernandez Prieto ◽  
Simon Peters ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Search Query ◽  
Disease Treatment ◽  
Search Queries ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
N Gram

BACKGROUND How to treat a disease remains to be the most common type of clinical question. Obtaining evidence-based answers from biomedical literature is difficult. Analogical reasoning with embeddings from deep learning (embedding analogies) may extract such biomedical facts, although the state-of-the-art focuses on pair-based proportional (pairwise) analogies such as man:woman::king:queen (“<i>queen = −man +king +woman</i>”). OBJECTIVE This study aimed to systematically extract disease treatment statements with a Semantic Deep Learning (SemDeep) approach underpinned by prior knowledge and another type of 4-term analogy (other than pairwise). METHODS As preliminaries, we investigated Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) embedding analogies in a common-English corpus with five lines of text and observed a type of 4-term analogy (not pairwise) applying the 3CosAdd formula and relating the semantic fields <i>person</i> and <i>death</i>: “dagger = −Romeo +die +died” (search query: −<i>Romeo +die +died</i>). Our SemDeep approach worked with pre-existing items of knowledge (what is known) to make inferences sanctioned by a 4-term analogy (search query −<i>x +z1 +z2</i>) from CBOW and Skip-gram embeddings created with a PubMed systematic reviews subset (PMSB dataset). Stage1: Knowledge acquisition. Obtaining a set of terms, candidate y, from embeddings using vector arithmetic. Some n-gram pairs from the cosine and validated with evidence (prior knowledge) are the input for the 3cosAdd, seeking a type of 4-term analogy relating the semantic fields disease and treatment. Stage 2: Knowledge organization. Identification of candidates sanctioned by the analogy belonging to the semantic field treatment and mapping these candidates to unified medical language system Metathesaurus concepts with MetaMap. A concept pair is a brief disease treatment statement (biomedical fact). Stage 3: Knowledge validation. An evidence-based evaluation followed by human validation of biomedical facts potentially useful for clinicians. RESULTS We obtained 5352 n-gram pairs from 446 search queries by applying the 3CosAdd. The microaveraging performance of MetaMap for candidate <i>y</i> belonging to the semantic field <i>treatment</i> was F-measure=80.00% (precision=77.00%, recall=83.25%). We developed an empirical heuristic with some predictive power for <i>clinical winners</i>, that is, search queries bringing candidate <i>y</i> with evidence of a therapeutic intent for target disease <i>x</i>. The search queries <i>-asthma +inhaled_corticosteroids +inhaled_corticosteroid</i> and <i>-epilepsy +valproate +antiepileptic_drug</i> were <i>clinical winners</i>, finding eight evidence-based beneficial treatments. CONCLUSIONS Extracting treatments with therapeutic intent by analogical reasoning from embeddings (423K n-grams from the PMSB dataset) is an ambitious goal. Our SemDeep approach is knowledge-based, underpinned by embedding analogies that exploit prior knowledge. Biomedical facts from embedding analogies (4-term type, not pairwise) are potentially useful for clinicians. The heuristic offers a practical way to discover beneficial treatments for well-known diseases. Learning from deep learning models does not require a massive amount of data. Embedding analogies are not limited to pairwise analogies; hence, analogical reasoning with embeddings is underexploited.

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