Brainstorming Versus Arguments Structuring in Online Forums

We characterize electronic discussion forums as being of one of the following two types: Brainstorming Forums and Arguments Structuring Forums. In this work we analyze and classify the types of threading models occurring as a function of the type of forum. For our analysis we study forums attached to the 25 news sources most used by the aggregator Google News, as detected by a 2007 study. Most discussion forums associated with articles on these news sources seem to be designed not with the purpose of structuring arguments but mainly with the purpose of helping readers brainstorm easily their reactions to the corresponding news item. The forums were classified as to what user-supported metadata they gather and use in comment presentation. We compare the features observed for brainstorming forums, as learned via the aforementioned procedure, with the features of dedicated argument structuring forums. The argument structuring forums that were used as basis of the comparison are: YourView, DebateDecide, and Opinion Space. We notice significant differences in the obtained models for the two types of forums, as well as significant differences with respect to the the structuring of user submitted data in polls associated with major news channels. We believe that this is the first kind of work that deals with the issue above.