Developing a Method for Quantifying Degree of Discussion Progress Towards Automatic Facilitation of Web-Based Discussion

Online discussion has major potential for large-scale consensus building. However, existing SNSs, microblogs, and chat systems lack facilitation functions for avoiding stagnation and flaming of discussion. To develop a function for detecting the stagnation of discussion, we need to quantify the degree of discussion progress, as just the amount of content is not enough to accurately gauge the discussion progress. Our definition of the degree of discussion progress is based on the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS). Specifically, it is defined as a sum of weights representing the importance of IBIS node types extracted from online discussion. In this paper, we determine the optimal weights of the IBIS node types to maximize the correlation coefficient between calculated progress and the subjective progress of human participants. The optimal weights are determined using a genetic algorithm. Experimental results showed that the maximized correlation coefficient was +0.54. Although the current definition of the discussion progress is simple summation, we plan to further refine it with the hierarchical structure of IBIS in future work.