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Thursday 4 January 2018

Don't kill the conversation

A paper from Cornell University describes an intriguing aid for online conversations. Why not let an artificial intelligence read what we are writing and offer constructive suggestions before we put our online foot in it?

Find the Conversation Killers: a Predictive Study of Thread-ending Posts
How to improve the quality of conversations in online communities has attracted considerable attention recently. Having engaged, urbane, and reactive online conversations has a critical effect on the social life of Internet users. In this study, we are particularly interested in identifying a post in a multi-party conversation that is unlikely to be further replied to, which therefore kills that thread of the conversation. For this purpose, we propose a deep learning model called the ConverNet. ConverNet is attractive due to its capability of modeling the internal structure of a long conversation and its appropriate encoding of the contextual information of the conversation, through effective integration of attention mechanisms. Empirical experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal model. For the widely concerned topic, our analysis also offers implications for improving the quality and user experience of online conversations.


What do you have to say about that? Nothing constructive? Then maybe you need ConverNet.

5 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Convernet talking to itself. Now that's what I call progress!

A K Haart said...

Sam - but would ConverNet call it progress? If so then there may be trouble ahead.

James Higham said...

Can't think of a word to say.

MikeW said...

The date is 2020. Mature CoverNet bots discover reference to 'Covernet'itself and Ad#lf H##ler, still end 98% of all threads dead in their tracks.

A K Haart said...

James - in which case you certainly need ConverNet.

Mike - if CoverNet learns from us then maybe that's inevitable.