A Web-based Tool for Communication Flow Analysis of Online Chats

GOALS AND PREMISES Chat as a communication medium has its own characteristics that need to be considered, especially regarding turn taking and interactional coherence. Following suggestions by Suthers et al. [8; 9], operational rules are used as a basis to detect general dependencies or “contingencies”. Indicators may use lexicalsemantic features but also time lapses between contributions play a crucial role in determining which utterances are to be linked with each other. This paper introduces a web-based system that automatically analyzes text chat logs for dependencies between posts and constructs a contingency graph from it. This graph is then used to further analyze the communication flow in the underlying text chat.