What Gets Echoed? Understanding the "Pointers" in Explanations of Persuasive Arguments

They can take many forms, ranging from everyday explanations for questions such as why one likes Star Wars, to sophisticated formalization in the philosophy of science (Salmon, 2006), to simply highlighting features in recent work on interpretable machine learning (Ribeiro et al., 2016). Although everyday explanations are mostly encoded in natural language, natural language explanations remain understudied in NLP, partly due to a lack of appropriate datasets and problem formulations. To address these challenges, we leverage /r/ChangeMyView, a community dedicated to sharing counterarguments to controversial views on Reddit, to build a sizable dataset of naturally-occurring explanations. Specifically, in /r/ChangeMyView, an original poster (OP) first delineates the rationales for a (controversial) opinion (e.g., in Table 1, "most hit music artists today are bad musicians"). Members of /r/ChangeMyVieware invited to provide counterarguments. If a counterargument changes the OP's view, the OP awards a to indicate the change and is required to explain why the counterargument is persuasive . In this work, we refer to what is being explained, including both the original post and the persuasive comment, as the explanandum.