Can narratives make arguments more persuasive? And to this end, which narrative features matter most? Although stories are often seen as powerful tools for persuasion, their specific role in online, unstructured argumentation remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present ARGUS, a framework for studying the impact of narration on persuasion in argumentative discourse. ARGUS introduces a new ChangeMyView corpus annotated for story presence and six key narrative features, integrating insights from two established theoretical frameworks that capture both textual narrative features and their effects on recipients. Leveraging both encoder-based classifiers and zero-shot large language models (LLMs), ARGUS identifies stories and narrative features and applies them at scale to examine how different narrative dimensions influence persuasion success in online argumentation.

翻译：叙事能否增强论点的说服力？为此，哪些叙事特征最为关键？尽管故事常被视为有力的说服工具，但其在在线非结构化论辩中的具体作用仍未得到充分探索。为填补这一空白，我们提出ARGUS框架，用于研究叙事在论辩性话语中对说服力的影响。ARGUS构建了一个全新的ChangeMyView语料库，标注了故事存在性及六项关键叙事特征，并融合了两种成熟理论框架的洞见——这些框架既能捕捉文本叙事特征，也能反映其对受众的影响。通过结合基于编码器的分类器与零样本大语言模型（LLMs），ARGUS实现了对故事及叙事特征的识别，并以此大规模分析不同叙事维度如何影响在线论辩中的说服成效。