Abstract
Controversial or complex topics often exhibit the backfire effect, where users' opinions harden in the face of facts to the contrary. We present initial work towards developing an online social collaborative argumentation system to verify alternative facts and misinformation by also including users' emotional associations with those stances. Our goal is to help users more effectively explore and understand their possibly subconscious biases in an effort to overcome the backfire effect and formulate more varied insights into complex and controversial topics. In order to aid this process, we model their emotional profile on such topics and combine it with a proposition profile, based on the semantic and collaborative content of propositions. We develop an algorithm to generate sentiment-based models of claims and propositions which we can filter based on users' inferred beliefs and the strength of those beliefs.