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posted by chromas on Wednesday July 25 2018, @12:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the Oh-yeah?-Yeah! dept.

Averting Toxic Chats: Computer Model Predicts When Online Conversations Turn Sour

The internet offers the potential for constructive dialogue and cooperation, but online conversations too often degenerate into personal attacks. In hopes that those attacks can be averted, researchers have created a model to predict which civil conversations might take a turn and derail.

After analyzing hundreds of exchanges between Wikipedia editors, the researchers developed a computer program that scans for warning signs in the language used by participants at the start of a conversation -- such as repeated, direct questioning or use of the word "you" -- to predict which initially civil conversations would go awry.

Early exchanges that included greetings, expressions of gratitude, hedges such as "it seems," and the words "I" and "we" were more likely to remain civil, the study found.

"We, as humans, have an intuition of whether a conversation is about to go awry, but it's often just a suspicion. We can't do it 100 percent of the time. We wonder if we can build systems to replicate or even go beyond this intuition," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil[*] said.

The computer model, which also considered Google's Perspective, a machine-learning tool for evaluating "toxicity," was correct around 65 percent of the time. Humans guessed correctly 72 percent of the time.

[...] The study analyzed 1,270 conversations that began civilly but degenerated into personal attacks, culled from 50 million conversations across 16 million Wikipedia "talk" pages, where editors discuss articles or other issues. They examined exchanges in pairs, comparing each conversation that ended badly with one that succeeded on the same topic, so the results weren't skewed by sensitive subject matter such as politics.

[*] Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil: assistant professor of information science and co-author of the paper Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure. (pdf)

The technique sounds useful for non-internet conversations, too... is there an app for that?


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  • (Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:26PM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:26PM (#712311)

    So, let's say a user mostly talks about technical stuff, but occasionally leaps into the fray on some political issue. Well, guess what? The censorship-happy users can go down-mod the technical stuff too, and thereby cut that user out of further debate for a month (or at least force that user to connect via some VPN or Tor, which has its own problems).

    It's not civil at all. In fact, it's very irritating.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:14PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:14PM (#712345) Homepage Journal

    Register and that doesn't happen without getting reversed. ACs don't get to claim mod bombing though because nobody but staff can tell one from another, OO aside.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:06PM (8 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:06PM (#712400)

    Usually I get (downmod) pounded when I get way off topic or make a weak argument, and rightly so by the mannerbund and I can respect and learn from that. I drink very rarely like less than once a month, but if I drink and shitpost the result is usually amateurish and awful, at least thats my weak shitty excuse.

    Sometimes the more outright leftist propaganda slanted stories I'll get attacked solely in those stories for pointing out the slant.

    An example would be the recent twitter political censorship story where the implied slant of what happened in Charlottesville was off the charts extreme left wing fake news talking point having very little relationship with reality, and pointing that out was NOT well received, downmodded, fuck off nazi type replies. To some extent I'm very proud of that situation, my post was so accurate and correct and factual the only political motivated response was sophistry, censorship, and name calling. If its that hard to disagree with what I write, maybe they should just face facts and agree with me? Guess I hit a nerve with laser like precision. This kind of situation is very rare, however. I'd say I get falsely downmodded around once a quarter.

    I will admit that including right wing memes and call outs and dog whistles in the shitpost dramatically increases the odds of it being downmodded. Strictly fact based encyclopedic reporting ALONE is much less likely to get downmodded than if I include at the end "P.S. 1488 gas the feminist landwhales" at the end. Especially if the article has nothing to do with landwhales or monolithic quadruple RS-232 line drivers from the pre-MAX232 integrated line driver integrated circuit era. Yes I am so old that I used 1489 and 1488 chips along with shitty +/- 15V dedicated linear power supplies, those were the bad old days for sure, but nostalgia, etc. For those who don't know, thats what 1488 means; those guys carrying torches and chanting "1488" at rallys, they're good old EE boys who dindu nothing wrong and merely used old computers a lot in the 70s/80s. Pretty self referential meta there, wonder if this post will make it thru LOL...

    On the other hand I recall a month or two ago finding a fake news gun control story that somehow got thru the editing queue without anyone noticing that five minutes of google work would show that the "academic paper" in the story was published in a fake journal, the only source of grant money for the "study" was an explicit gun control political action committee, the conclusion of the fake academic paper was suspiciously similar to the mission statement of the gun control advocacy PAC, the "authors" of the paper seem to be employees of the PAC, it was just the weakest propaganda fake news marketing white paper full of lies as if it were a real academic research study I've seen in awhile. And that should have gotten slammed per the previous paragraph targeting data, although it didn't. I admit I was laughing at the low quality of the propaganda effort pretty hard while posting about it, which kept me on topic.

    Now what I DO see downmodded often is stuff thats so weird I can't even define it, and not superficially political, so where exactly is a comment like this not off topic, obviously someone else's drunk shitposting game is way past mine:

    The Hero and Protector of all Thai boypussy ventures into the cave of wonders.

    Like, what does that even mean? Is that even written in English? It kinda seems to be, but ...

    I've also seen some pretty weird long erotic fiction on SN in some inappropriate articles get downmodded into oblivion. You'll have some article about hard drive long term survival with a comment about SMART hard drive test results over time on Linux and outta nowhere the next comment will be some bizarre BDSM erotic fic, and all I can really say about that, is you gotta expect that kinda thing after integrating systemD, I guess. Don't miss that, the grass really is greener over on FreeBSD, although I still nostalgically remember the pre-systemd linux days back when stuff actually worked.

    So I guess the above is an attempt at a fact based referenced copy and pasted examples counterargument to

    The censorship-happy users can go down-mod the technical stuff too

    or rephrased, put up or shut up? I'm not saying its never happened, but the rate of it happening has been observed to have an incredibly low upper bound rate if the rate is not actually zero.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:32PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:32PM (#712418) Journal

      LMAO @ 1488. I might try a hit of whatever you're smoking. Hell, you might even be more than half right, but that sure as hell isn't what 1488 means to a bunch of skinheads!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:47PM (6 children)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:47PM (#712514) Journal

      what happened in Charlottesville was off the charts extreme left wing fake news talking point having very little relationship with reality, and pointing that out was NOT well received

      Yes, just screaming FAKE NEWS over and over again is Redundant.

      If you're going to lie about video we all saw with our own two eyes, in the face of an indictment that could carry the death penalty [npr.org], you should probably expect to get modded down.

      Now, if you cared to enter a debate in good-faith, stopped lying, and chose to argue that he is innocent until proven guilty, you probably wouldn't get the same treatment.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM (#712637)

        You make his point for him. What happened in Charlottesville was not limited to one single reprehensible incident. You choose to focus only on that and justify the down modding while overlooking all other activities from both sides. That was his point.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @11:51PM (4 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @11:51PM (#712792)

          So focusing on the vehicular murder is the wrong thing there? You are insane.

          We could argue all day about which violent group was how wrong, but in the end the neo nazi running people over with is car was the most important part. Saying "both sides" is stupid and we're tired of hearing you defenders of Nazis.

          VLM is well known for spewing hateful lying garbage he gets from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:33AM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:33AM (#712987)

            When the right wing death squads emerge and begin the new holocaust, should I be there to defend you?

            Maybe I should focus exclusively on the preceding terror attack from "your side" and simply accept that this response was inevitable.

            You people are well known for spewing hateful garbage you get from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.

            • (Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:19PM (1 child)

              by Oakenshield (4900) on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:19PM (#713069)

              When the right wing death squads emerge and begin the new holocaust, should I be there to defend you?

              Maybe I should focus exclusively on the preceding terror attack from "your side" and simply accept that this response was inevitable.

              You people are well known for spewing hateful garbage you get from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.

              When the left wing death squads emerge and begin the new cultural revolution or Khmer Rouge purge, should I be there to defend you?

              Maybe I should focus exclusively on the preceding terror attack from "your side" and simply accept that this response was inevitable.

              You people are well known for spewing hateful garbage you get from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @07:10PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @07:10PM (#713316)

                The left wing death squads are already here. We've seen what they can do, and it's nothing.

                When the right wing death squads appear, you will be very aware.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:55PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:55PM (#713086)

            So focusing on the vehicular murder is the wrong thing there? You are insane.

            Painting everyone on "the other side" in broad strokes based upon the actions of one nutcase is the wrong thing there, yes. Should ALL progressive movement proponents be judged based upon the actions of Yvette Felarca, Nasim Aghdam, Eric Clanton, or any of the violent extremists that associate with them? Just because you disagree with the ideology of "the other guy" doesn't mean that the actions of one murderer is representative of everyone.

            Look at it this way. When a Middle Eastern person drives over a bunch of innocent people and "the other side" paints all Middle Easterners as terrorists, do you jump up and down screaming "Nuh Uh"? Or do you say, we shouldn't have any Middle Easterners here because they are all like those Islamist murderers in Toronto, Columbus, Boston, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Ft Hood, Orlando and everywhere else these things occurred? Maybe they didn't all participate in the action, but "They all agree with the philosophy." This is exactly how the left is behaving.

            When everyone who disagrees with you is a "Nazi" you ought to realize you are not seeing clearly. Take a good look in the mirror and maybe you will see that you are blinded by your own ideology.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:26PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:26PM (#712413) Journal

    Not so. I've tried to explain this elsewhere, let me try it again.

    I'm a somewhat hi-vis person here. Some of the lefties hate me, some of the lefties dislike me, and of the remaining people, I think most are close to neutral, with a few people liking me. I have no fear of jumping into a conversation, and I reap the downmods from those who hate me the most, plus I get some from the people who dislike me. And, TBH, sometimes I get downmods from neutral people, and even a few from people who probably like me.

    But, unless you make an effort to be censored into oblivion, there are enough moderators who are rational, and fair, to pull your stuff out of obscurity.

    Just because 3, 9, or even 12 people mod me a troll, does NOT mean that my post becomes invisible.

    Somewhere, back in the mists of time (meaning more than a couple days ago) TMB posted the list of the recipients of the most troll mods. TMB and I were both near the top of that list. Neither of us has disappeared, or dried up and blown away as a result.

    If you are contributing meaningfully, don't worry about detractors. Keep up the good work, and people will show their appreciation.

    • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:12PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:12PM (#712444)

      Not so. I've tried to explain this elsewhere, let me try it again.

      Oh, gosh. I was hoping you'd be sleeping your hangover in a sewage drain and let me be spared of your babble. You can't abstain, can you?

      I'm a somewhat hi-vis person here.

      In your dreams perhaps. It's the visibility of an annoying mosquito in a hot tropical night.

      I have no fear of jumping into a conversation

      Hardly can call most of your posts a "conversation" Mostly noise, like those short wave russian stations bleeding into a neighbouring frequency.

      But, unless you make an effort to be censored into oblivion, there are enough moderators who are rational, and fair, to pull your stuff out of obscurity.

      This assumes your post having something worth saving - a big assumption when it comes to your posts. But yeah there are weird people with a fetish for bullshit.

      Just because 3, 9, or even 12 people mod me a troll, does NOT mean that my post becomes invisible.

      It doesn't make it bear a meaning either. I suspect those who save your bullshit from oblivion are doing it to have some examples to teach their grandkids how not to behave.

      If you are contributing meaningfully, ...

      Ironic, ain't it. All this thread starting from a whiny AC post. Meaningful contribution indeed.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:47PM (#712467)

        Jelly?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:30PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:30PM (#712752)

          Nope. Jerky

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:49PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:49PM (#712517)

        I disagree with Runaway all the time and believe he makes lots of shitposts without fully being aware, yet your little tit-for-tat list there is the height of lame bitchy whining. It is no surprise what part of your personality is causing the downmods.