Debate has always been integral to democracy. In its most beautiful form, a presidential debate is a meeting of minds, a moment when two or more upright and well-spoken potential statesmen argue over the fate of a nation and enlighten listeners about their policy positions. In its ugliest appearance, debate devolves into a charade viewed for entertainment rather than illumination, a circus performance full of eye-rolling, name-calling, and deflections.
A team of researchers at Northeastern University have taken on the task of predicting debate “winners” by deconstructing their arguments, hoping to encourage more meaningful meetings. The researchers aren’t focused on style but content — they’re concern isn’t with fancy rhetoric or theatrics but with sound reasoning. It’s an idealized outlook of debates but one they hope will help support the democratic practice.
To aid in their efforts, they developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can pick out features of a strong argument. They trained the system on 118 Intelligence Squared debates and, simply by analyzing the argument, the algorithm was able to predict the winner nearly three-quarters of the time. A paper detailing their research was published in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
“Using just the debate transcripts, our model is able to predict debate … which side is likely to win over more audience support with around 74 percent accuracy,” Nick Beauchamp, an assistant political science professor at Northeastern and one of the project leads, told Digital Trends. “Many people have tried to predict debate winners before using only surface stylistic features, and ours uses all these sorts of features as well — sentiment, abstraction, sentence complexity — but using those things only gets you about 66 percent accuracy. It’s only when you add in this notion of latent arguments and argument strength that you able to predict winners so accurately.”
Despite focusing mainly on the strength of arguments, the researchers found that certain stylistic features appeared in more winning debates. Namely, concrete language (nouns, verbs, numbers) and simpler sentences. Stronger arguments also emphasize more negative emotions like anger and disgust, while weaker ones feature more positive sentiments like hope and trust. Weaker debaters also tend to use “you” and I,” while stronger ones include “we” and “us.”
Beauchamp admits that predicting a presidential debate winner (particularly after the fact) has limited use in the real world. However, he sees some utility in using this type of tool to explore and explain how and why debates are won. He envisions such a tool providing real-time feedback to viewers during a debate, from highlighting a strong and sound argument to flagging a weak one.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.