Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:55PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:55PM (#712330)

    At the end of the day, shit needs gettin' done, and normal healthy non-leftist Men are the best at getting shit done.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Troll=1, Insightful=3, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:53PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:53PM (#712524)

    Heh, then pray tell why has the economic activity become concentrated in liberal areas? Oh right, just more of your jealousy leaking through so you try and use dumb shit like hanging a pair of nuts of your truck's bumper to make you feel important and manly.

    You know how to tell when someone has been emasculated and needs to bolster their self-esteem with nonsense?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:00PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:00PM (#712532)

      The mathematician and historian Oswald Spengler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West/ [wikipedia.org]) wrote about this.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:00AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:00AM (#712795)

        I'm going to take an uneducated stab after reading the wikipedia bits.

        The decline of Western civilization is actually the ideological decline of capitalism and oligarchy. The way forward for humanity is a more decentralized distribution of wealth and power instead of the top down pyramid structure that has been dominating heavily for thousands of years.

        Western civilization gained power and control through technological imperialism, but now the general population in the western cultures are realizing what a sham the capitalistic ideal really is. We will take the good and try to fix the bad and start the next cultural / civilization epoch. Hopefully we can get most of the world on board with a better system before the insane people push the big buttons.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:26AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:26AM (#712873)

      Liberals are attracted to wealth, because you can't steal from poor people to pay for your stupid ideas.