# What Makes a Message Persuasive? Identifying Adaptations Towards Persuasiveness in Nine Exploratory Case Studies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12454/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Dear Sir or Madam, May I introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06535/) (2018)
- [Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01103/) (2016)
- [DiscoFuse: A Large-Scale Dataset for Discourse-Based Sentence Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10526/) (2019)
- [An Unsupervised Domain-Independent Framework for Automated Detection of Persuasion Tactics in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06745/) (2019)
- [Event Outcome Prediction using Sentiment Analysis and Crowd Wisdom in Microblog Feeds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05066/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to persuade others is critical to professional and personal success. However, crafting persuasive messages is demanding and poses various challenges. We conducted nine exploratory case studies to identify adaptations that professional and non-professional writers make in written scenarios to increase their subjective persuasiveness. Furthermore, we identified challenges that those writers faced and identified strategies to resolve them with persuasive natural language generation, i.e., artificial intelligence. Our findings show that humans can achieve high degrees of persuasiveness (more so for professional-level writers), and artificial intelligence can complement them to achieve increased celerity and alignment in the process.