TAIGR: Towards Modeling Influencer Content on Social Media via Structured, Pragmatic Inference

Nishanth Sridhar Nakshatri, Eylon Caplan, Rajkumar Pujari, Dan Goldwasser

Abstract: Health influencers play a growing role in shaping public beliefs, yet their content is often conveyed through conversational narratives and rhetorical strategies rather than explicit factual claims. As a result, claim-centric verification methods struggle to capture the pragmatic meaning of influencer discourse. In this paper, we propose TAIGR (Takeaway Argumentation Inference with Grounded References), a structured framework designed to analyze influencer discourse, which operates in 3 stages: (1) identifying the core influencer recommendation--takeaway; (2) constructing an argumentation graph that captures influencer justification for the takeaway; (3) performing factor graph-based probabilistic inference to validate the takeaway. We evaluate TAIGR on a content validation task over influencer video transcripts on health, showing that accurate validation requires modeling the discourse’s pragmatic and argumentative structure rather than treating transcripts as flat collections of claims.