This  study  investigated  the  effect  of  language  complexity  and  group  size  on  knowledge construction in two online debates. Knowledge construction was assessed using Gunawardena et al.’s Interaction Analysis Model (1997). Language complexity was determined by dividing the  number  of  unique  words  by  total  words.  It  refers  to  the  lexical  variation.  The  results showed  that...

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 ...

This paper presents an unsupervised opinion analysis method for debate-side classification, i.e., recognizing which stance a person is taking in an online debate. In order to handle the complexities of this genre, we mine the web to learn associations that are indicative of opinion stances in debates. We combine this knowledge with discourse information, and formulate the debate side classifica...

Social networks can be a very successful tool to engage users discuss relevant topics for society. However, there are also some dangers that associated with them, such as the emergence of polarization in online discussions. Recently, has been growing interest try understand this phenomenon, consider harmful concerning building healthy society which citizens get used polite discussions and even ...

Topic-independent expressions for conveying agreement and disagreement were annotated in a corpus of web forum debates, in order to evaluate a classifier trained to detect these two categories. Among the 175 expressions annotated in the evaluation set, 163 were unique, which shows that there is large variation in expressions used. This variation might be one of the reasons why the task of autom...

Psycholinguistic phenomenon of communication accommodation (Giles et al., 1991) is probably one of the most important contributions in the interdisciplinary field of linguistics, psychology, information, and communication theory. Existing works have applied this theory to various domains like gesture, linguistics, backchannels, and even social media like tweets. In this work, we analyze the psy...

Online debates sparkle argumentative discussions from which generally accepted arguments often emerge. We consider the task of unsupervised identification of prominent argument in online debates. As a first step, in this paper we perform a cluster analysis using semantic textual similarity to detect similar arguments. We perform a preliminary cluster evaluation and error analysis based on clust...