Promoting Constructive Deliberation: Reframing for Receptiveness

To promote constructive discussion of controversial topics online, we propose automatic reframing of disagreeing responses to signal receptiveness while preserving meaning. Drawing on research from psychology, communications, and linguistics, we identify six strategies for reframing. We automatically reframe replies according to each strategy, using a dataset of Reddit comments and replies. Through human-centered experiments, we find that the replies generated with our framework are perceived to be significantly more receptive than the original replies, as well as a generic receptiveness baseline. We analyze and discuss the implications of our results and highlight applications to content moderation. Overall, we illustrate how transforming receptiveness, a particular social science construct, into a computational framework, can make LLM generations more aligned with human perceptions.