This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists and a computational system that tries to learn from these annotations.

Pranav Anand is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCSC.

Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC.