earticle

영어

This study uses a large language model (LLM) to identify Aristotle's rhetorical principles (ethos, pathos, and logos) in COVID-19 information on Naver Knowledge-iN, South Korea's leading question-and-answer community. The research analyzed the differences of these rhetorical elements in the most upvoted answers with random answers. A total of 193 answer pairs were randomly selected, with 135 pairs for training and 58 for testing. These answers were then coded in line with the rhetorical principles to refine GPT 3.5-based models. The models achieved F1 scores of .88 (ethos), .81 (pathos), and .69 (logos). Subsequent analysis of 128 new answer pairs revealed that logos, particularly factual information and logical reasoning, was more frequently used in the most upvoted answers than the random answers, whereas there were no differences in ethos and pathos between the answer groups. The results suggest that health information consumers value information including logos while ethos and pathos were not associated with consumers’ preference for health information. By utilizing an LLM for the analysis of persuasive content, which has been typically conducted manually with much labor and time, this study not only demonstrates the feasibility of using an LLM for latent content but also contributes to expanding the horizon in the field of AI text extraction.