Home // SOTICS 2015,The Fifth International Conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics // View article

Making Sense of Large-Group Discussions using Rhetorically Structured Text

Authors:
Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia
Mark Klein

Keywords: Rhetorical structure theory; RST; online group deliberation; web forums; argument maps; crowd-computing; social computing

Abstract:
Recent advances in social media technology have made it possible to involve large groups in online deliberations, using such tools as forums and argument maps. As discussions develop, however, making sense of their content can become a big challenge for newcomers, thus impeding their potential participation. We posited that rhetorically organized narratives can foster superior comprehensibility, and conducted an experimental evaluation that supports this claim. Human subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire about a discussion presented in one of three formats: forum, argument map, and rhetorically structured text. The rhetorical structures produced superior question-answering performance for complex questions. In this paper, we discuss these results, as well as their implications for the design of large group interaction tools.

Pages: 26 to 35

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: November 15, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-443-5

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from November 15, 2015 to November 20, 2015