Abstract: In contexts where debate and

deliberation is the norm, participants are regularly presented with new information that conflicts with their original beliefs. When required to update their beliefs (belief alignment), they may choose arguments that align with their worldview (confirmation bias). We test this and competing hypotheses in a constraint-based modeling approach to predict the winning arguments in multi-party interactions in the Reddit ChangeMyView dataset. We impose structural constraints that reflect competing hypotheses on a hierarchical generative Variational Auto-encoder. Our findings suggest that when arguments are further from the initial belief state of the target, they are more likely to succeed.