What makes you change your mind? An empirical investigation in online group decision-making conversations

Abstract: People leverage group discussions to collaborate in order to solve complex tasks, e.g. in project meetings or hiring panels. By doing so, they engage in a variety of conversational strategies where they try to convince each other of the best approach and ultimately reach a decision. In this work, we investigate methods for detecting what makes someone change their mind. To this end, we leverage a recently introduced dataset containing group discussions of people collaborating to solve a task. To find out what makes someone change their mind, we incorporate various techniques such as neural text classification and language-agnostic change point detection. Evaluation of these methods shows that while the task is not trivial, the best way to approach it is using a language-aware model with learning-to-rank training. Finally, we examine the cues that the models develop as indicative of the cause of a change of mind.