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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, @02:11PM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:11PM (#712344)

    One "side" is not very civil; they have no moral qualms with silencing someone who disagrees.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   0  
       Redundant=1, Insightful=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Redundant' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   0  
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:17PM (9 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:17PM (#712348) Journal

    If that were true, the karma of certain users would be in the shitter. TMB and VLM both have 50 though. realDonaldTrump is at 45 despite being blasted with downmods lately. Seems the asymmetry is currently favoring speech.

    Certain comments deserve to be modded down. Certain users and anons will whine about being modded down. Life goes on.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:21PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:21PM (#712351)

      You know that's nonsense.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:24PM (5 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:24PM (#712353) Homepage Journal

      Plus it's much, much easier to gain karma than to lose it. ACs can only lose one point per comment, registered two, but they can gain five points per comment, four for registered folks.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:43PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:43PM (#712377)

        The result is that in a long-term, recurring debate (e.g., something regarding politics), those who disagree with a censorial group WILL be shut down.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:46PM (3 children)

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:46PM (#712426) Homepage Journal

          It most certainly is not. I have long, heated debates all the time with world + dog. This would not be the case if either I or my.opponents were being shut down. Find any highly opinionated person on the site and you'll find the exact same thing. We self-correct quite well on average.

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          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:33PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:33PM (#712503)

            So, I just don't know what you're bagging on about. Your replies certainly don't resonate with my experience.

            • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:43PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:43PM (#712511)

              If you're shitposting harder than TMB then you reaaaally need to take a good hard look at yourself, y'know, objectively as much as possible.

            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:31PM

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:31PM (#712561) Homepage Journal

              I'm not bragging. I'm saying either you're posting low quality garbage or you're lying to stir up shit. Either way, up your game.

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              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:16PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:16PM (#712405) Journal

      Life goes on.

      Are you related to John Cougar, by any chance?

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:58PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:58PM (#712527)

    One "side" is not very civil; they have no moral qualms with silencing someone who disagrees.

    That's total nonsense. I'm about as left-wing as they come, the sort who thinks Bernie Sanders doesn't go far enough and descended from a guy who was blacklisted in the 1950's for his communist connections. My karma is 50 most of the time. There are a bunch of right-wing folks whose karma is also 50 most of the time.

    Since you're an AC, I don't know what your actual posting history looks like, but when I've read at -1 threshold, I've found that those comments modded into oblivion completely deserved it for non-political reasons. If you want to be modded up, I suggest not posting things that aren't stupid and are more interesting than repeating slogans of whatever affiliation you've decided to give yourself.

    Here's an example of the kind of post that I would disagree with and probably reply to, but would never consider modding down:
    "While this ballot initiative sounds like a great idea, it's going to cause a budget problem because there's a $10 billion price tag and no obvious way to make it up."

    Here's an example of the kind of post that I would agree with, and would mod into oblivion:
    "Trump is T3H SuX00RR5 L0L!"

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