Patients discuss complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in online health communities. Sometimes, patients' conflicting opinions toward CAM-related issues trigger debates in the community. The objectives of this paper are to identify such debates, identify controversial CAM therapies in a popular online breast cancer community, as well as patients' stances towards them. To scale our analys...

Two players hold contradicting positions regarding a given issue, which depends on a (fixed) number of aspects or criteria they both know. Suppose, as a third-party, that you want to make a decision based on what will report the players. Unfortunately, what the players can communicate is limited. How should you design the rules of your protocol so as to minimize the mistakes induced by these co...

Debate summarization is one of the novel and challenging research areas in automatic text summarization which has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we develop a debate summarization pipeline to summarize key topics which are discussed or argued in the two opposing sides of online debates. We view that the generation of debate summaries can be achieved by clustering, cluster labeling, and ...

In Germany the public awareness on ethical problems of the application of medicine and life sciences on human beings is very high. It can be observed that German Society is rather sensitive concerning bioethical issues. Politics supports this attitude. Many articles in professional journals as well as in newspapers cover bioethical issues. Conferences and workshops on a professional and an educ...

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 Oxfordstyle debates—a competitive format where the winner is determined by audience votes—and show how the outcome of a debate depends on aspect...

In this paper, the automatic detection of conflict in audiovisual recordings of political debates is addressed. In contrast to the current state of the art in social signal processing, where only the audio modality is employed for analysing the human non-verbal behavior, we propose to use additionally visual features capturing certain facial behavioral cues such as head nodding, fidgeting and f...

The perception by humans of what is doable is itself a great determiner of future events. Thus, the successful sheep cloning experiment leading to “Dolly” by Ian Wilmut and associates at Roslin Institute, Midlothian, UK, compels us to look in the mirror and consider the issue of human cloning. Should it occur, and if not, how should that opposing mandate be managed? If human cloning should have...