With the dataset in hand, we then propose the novel task of studying persuasion (1) at the level of individual users, and (2) in a setting that can control for selected user-level factors, in our case, the prior beliefs associated with the political or religious ideology of the debaters and voters.
previous studies focus on predicting the winner of a debate based on the cumulative change in pre-debate vs. post-debate votes for the opposing sides (Zhang et al., 2016;Potash and Rumshisky, 2017).