# An Item Response Theory Framework for Persuasion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11337/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01103/) (2016)
- [A Large-scale Dataset for Argument Quality Ranking: Construction and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11408/) (2019)
- [Automatic Argument Quality Assessment -- New Datasets and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01007/) (2019)
- [Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09085/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Role of Prior Beliefs for Argument Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11301/) (2019)
- [Are You Convinced? Choosing the More Convincing Evidence with a Siamese Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08971/) (2019)
- [A Corpus for Modeling User and Language Effects in Argumentation on Online Debating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11310/) (2019)
- [Text-Based Ideal Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04232/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09072/) (2022)
- [Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14501/) (2025)
- [Argument Quality Assessment in the Age of Instruction-Following Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16084/) (2024)
- [Reanalyzing L2 Preposition Learning with Bayesian Mixed Effects and a Pretrained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08150/) (2023)
- [Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01097/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we apply Item Response Theory, popular in education and political science research, to the analysis of argument persuasiveness in language. We empirically evaluate the model's performance on three datasets, including a novel dataset in the area of political advocacy. We show the advantages of separating these components under several style and content representations, including evaluating the ability of the speaker embeddings generated by the model to parallel real-world observations about persuadability.