It's not only What You Say, It's also Who It's Said to: Counterfactual Analysis of Interactive Behavior in the Courtroom

Anonymous

Abstract: To what extent do personal attributes affect the way we are spoken to? Answering this question requires the precise reproduction of a conversational context except for one personal attribute of interest, amounting to a classical, yet infeasible, causal inference problem. We present a method based on counterfactual analysis by manipulating speaker attributes in observational data. We present a case study of Advocate responses to Justices in debates in the Supreme Court of the United States. Specifically, we measure changes in politeness and coordination of Advocates when responding to (a) real Justices and (b) counterfactually-manipulated Justices, with responses generated with GPT2. We first validate our method, showing that GPT2-generated outputs capture coordination and politeness. Our results confirm a known impact of the attribute gender, and suggest a weaker effect of seniority on coordination.

Paper Type: short

Research Area: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness