# Ethos and Pathos in Online Group Discussions: Corpora for Polarisation Issues in Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04889/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [EmoBank: Studying the Impact of Annotation Perspective and Representation Format on Dimensional Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01996/) (2022)
- [Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06613/) (2018)
- [Polarizing Tweets on Climate Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13054/) (2020)
- ["Dummy Grandpa, do you know anything?": Identifying and Characterizing Ad hominem Fallacy Usage in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02062/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12657/) (2025)
- [Assessing LLM Reasoning Through Implicit Causal Chain Discovery in Climate Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13417/) (2025)
- [How Ethos and Pathos Appeals Resonate in Reader Interpretations of Social Media Messages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00873/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Growing polarisation in society caught the attention of the scientific community as well as news media, which devote special issues to this phenomenon. At the same time, digitalisation of social interactions requires to revise concepts from social science regarding establishment of trust, which is a key feature of all human interactions, and group polarisation, as well as new computational tools to process large quantities of available data. Existing methods seem insufficient to tackle the problem fully, thus, we propose to approach the problem by investigating rhetorical strategies employed by individuals in polarising discussions online. To this end, we develop multi-topic and multi-platform corpora with manual annotation of appeals to ethos and pathos, two modes of persuasion in Aristotelian rhetoric. It can be employed for training language models to advance the study of communication strategies online on a large scale. With the use of computational methods, our corpora allows an investigation of recurring patterns in polarising exchanges across topics of discussion and media platforms, and conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses of language structures leading to and engaged in polarisation.