A Corpus of Participant Roles in Contentious Discussions

Participants in online social environments adopt various roles. The concept of social role has long been used in social science to describe the intersection of behavioural, meaningful, and structural attributes that emerge regularly in particular settings. In this paper, we explore various behavioural attributes such as stubbornness, sensibility, influence, and ignorance to create a model of the social roles that participants assume. We annotate discussions drawn from two different corpora in order to validate our model of social roles and their signals. We discuss various criteria for deciding values for the behavioural attributes that define the roles. We deliver a new corpus of online contentious discussions with annotated social roles.