New subject: Modeling interactions on talk pages and detecting early signs of conversational failure: Research Showcase - June 18, 2018 (11:30 AM PDT| 18:30 UTC)

31 May 2018


      Hey everyone,
we're hosting a dedicated session in June on our joint work with Cornell
and Jigsaw on predicting conversational failure
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.05345 on Wikipedia talk pages. This is part of
our contribution to WMF's Anti-Harassment program.
The showcase
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#June_2018 will be
live-streamed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4vzI0k4OSg on *Monday,
June 18, 2018* at 11:30 AM (PDT), 18:30 (UTC).  (Please note this falls on
a Monday this month).
Conversations Gone Awry. Detecting Early Signs of Conversational
FailureBy *Justine
Zhang and Jonathan Chang, Cornell University*One of the main challenges
online social systems face is the prevalence of antisocial behavior, such
as harassment and personal attacks. In this work, we introduce the task of
predicting from the very start of a conversation whether it will get out of
hand. As opposed to detecting undesirable behavior after the fact, this
task aims to enable early, actionable prediction at a time when the
conversation might still be salvaged. To this end, we develop a framework
for capturing pragmatic devices—such as politeness strategies and
rhetorical prompts—used to start a conversation, and analyze their relation
to its future trajectory. Applying this framework in a controlled setting,
we demonstrate the feasibility of detecting early warning signs of
antisocial behavior in online discussions.
Building a rich conversation corpus from Wikipedia Talk pagesWe present a
corpus of conversations that encompasses the complete history of
interactions between contributors to English Wikipedia's Talk Pages. This
captures a new view of these interactions by containing not only the final
form of each conversation but also detailed information on all the actions
that led to it: new comments, as well as modifications, deletions and
restorations. This level of detail supports new research questions
pertaining to the process (and challenges) of large-scale online
collaboration. As an example, we present a small study of removed comments
highlighting that contributors successfully take action on more toxic
behavior than was previously estimated.
YouTube stream:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4vzI0k4OSg
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhV3K_DS5YfLQLgwU3oDFiGaU3K7pUVoW.
Hope to see you there on June 18!
Dario

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