  Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging
views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking
how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach
in a case study of Oxford-style debates---a competitive format where the winner
is determined by audience votes---and show how the outcome of a debate depends
on aspects of conversational flow. In particular, we find that winners tend to
make better use of a debate's interactive component than losers, by actively
pursuing their opponents' points rather than promoting their own ideas over the
course of the conversation.
