# The Role of Pragmatic and Discourse Context in Determining Argument Impact

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03034 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03034/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

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- [Exploring Discourse Structures for Argument Impact Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00976/) (2021)
- [Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14501/) (2025)
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- [On the Visualisation of Argumentation Graphs to Support Text Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03235/) (2023)
- [DEPTH: Discourse Education through Pre-Training Hierarchically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07788/) (2024)
- [Persona Knowledge-Aligned Prompt Tuning Method for Online Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04239/) (2024)
- [Spontaneous Persuasion: An Audit of Model Persuasiveness in Everyday Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22109/) (2026)
- [A Model of Multi-turn Human Persuadability Using Probabilistic Belief Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05330/) (2026)
- [DiPS: Dialogue Policy Selection for High-Stakes Persuasion Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01557/) (2026)
- [The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05514/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of the argument's claims given the pragmatic and discourse context of the argument. Among these characteristics of persuasive arguments, prior work in NLP does not explicitly investigate the effect of the pragmatic and discourse context when determining argument quality. This paper presents a new dataset to initiate the study of this aspect of argumentation: it consists of a diverse collection of arguments covering 741 controversial topics and comprising over 47,000 claims. We further propose predictive models that incorporate the pragmatic and discourse context of argumentative claims and show that they outperform models that rely only on claim-specific linguistic features for predicting the perceived impact of individual claims within a particular line of argument.