Chrysanne Di Marco

Towards Personality-driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems

Persuasive games and gamified systems are effective tools for motivating behavior change using various persuasive strategies. Research has shown that tailoring these systems can increase their efficacy. However, there is little knowledge on how game-based persuasive systems can be tailored to individuals of various personality traits. To advance research in this area, we conducted a large-scale study of 660 participants to investigate how different personalities respond to various persuasive strategies that are used in persuasive health games and gamified systems. Our results reveal that peoples personality traits play a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies. Conscientious people tend to be motivated by goal setting, simulation, self-monitoring and feedback; people who are more open to experience are more likely to be demotivated by rewards, competition, comparison, and cooperation. We contribute to the CHI community by offering design guidelines for tailoring persuasive games and gamified designs to a particular group of personalities.

The Frequency of Hedging Cues in Citation Contexts in Scientific Writing

Citations in scientific writing fulfill an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure that is intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations within the argumentative context in which a citation is placed. To determine these relations automatically in scientific writing, we have suggested that stylistic and rhetorical cues will be significant. One type of cue that we have studied is the discourse cue, which provides cohesion among textual components. Another form of rhetorical cue involves hedging to modify the affect of a scientific claim. Hedging in scientific writing has been extensively studied by Hyland, including cataloging the pragmatic functions of the various types of cues. In this paper we show that the hedging cues proposed by Hyland occur more frequently in citation contexts than in the text as a whole. With this information we conjecture that hedging cues are an important aspect of the rhetorical relations found in citation contexts and that the pragmatics of hedges may help in determining the purpose of citations.

Using Hedges to Classify Citations in Scientific Articles

Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations within the argumentative context in which a citation is placed. To determine these relations automatically, we have suggested that various stylistic and rhetorical cues will be significant. One such cue that we are studying is the use of hedging to modify the affect of a scientific claim. We provide evidence that hedging occurs more frequently in citation contexts than in the text as a whole. With this information we conjecture that hedging is a significant aspect of the rhetorical structure of citation contexts and that the pragmatics of hedges may help in determining the rhetorical purpose of citations. A citation indexing tool for biomedical literature analysis is introduced.

The importance of fine-grained cue phrases in scientific citations

Scientific citations play a crucial role in maintaining the network of relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. Customarily, authors include citations in their papers to indicate works that are foundational in their field, background for their own work, or representative of complementary or contradictory research. But, determining the nature of the exact relationshipb etween a citing and cited paper is often difficult to ascertain. To address this problem, the aim of formal citation analysis has been to categorize and, ultimately, automatically classify scientific citations. In previous work, Garzone and Mercer (2000) presented a system for citation classification that relied on characteristic syntactic structure to determine citation category. In this present work, we extend this idea to propose that fine-grained cue phrases within citation sentences may provide a stylistic basis for just such a categorization.

Rhetorical Figuration as a Metric in Text Summarization

We show that surface-level markers of pragmatic intent can be used to recognize the important sentences in text and can thereby improve the performance of text summarization systems. In particular, we focus on using automated detection of rhetorical figures—characteristic syntactic patterns of persuasive language—to provide information for an additional metric to enhance the performance of the MEAD summarizer.

Rhetorical figures, arguments, computation

Then he went about his regular, non-Twitter affairs. The next afternoon, fresh from a nap, he checked his account, stared at the outcome, and tweeted to @upulieto, an associate, “I just woke up. What a mess” [49]. His tweet had spiraled virally: tens of thousands of likes, retweets, endless streams of commentary. Why? Well, lots of factors, of course. There is rarely a single factor to which one can point in rapid cultural propagation. But the pithiness of the tweet, its form/function iconicity, and its argumentative force are surely three of those factors – perhaps the three most important – and all of them are a direct consequence of the tweet’s rhetorical figures. Its figures notably capitalize on repetition, a stylistic move one might think is anathema to twitter. Repetitions are highly redundant, contributing very little new information. They should therefore be corrosive to the concision so necessary to effective tweets. Repetitions distend the ideational function, not condense it, making them very costly in twitter, which provides only a 140-character vehicle. And yet: the tweet was instantly and broadly recognized as a brilliant, incisive, necessarily brief and highly effective argument. Most notable among its figuration is the compound figure, symploce, in which the same word or words are repeated at the beginnings and endings of proximal clauses or phrases (Women in and wearing hijab). Symploce is a compound figure because it is a combination of epanaphora (phraseor clause-initial