Identifying, Annotating, and Filtering Arguments and Opinions in
Open Collaboration Systems
Download the thesis or slides.
My Ph.D. thesis, “Identifying, Annotating, and Filtering Arguments and Opinions in
Open Collaboration Systems” (2013, National University of Ireland, Galway - Digital Enterprise Research Institute), addresses the problem of analysing, integrating, and
reconciling information in online discussions.
The World Wide Web enables large-scale collaboration, even between
groups of individuals previously unknown to one another. These online
collaborations produce tangible outputs, such as encyclopedias,
electronic books, maps and open source software packages. In such open
collaborations systems, decisions are made through open discussions,
based on the written arguments and opinions that individuals contribute.
The goal of this thesis is to help people make sense of written
arguments in these types of decision-making discussions.
In this thesis, we develop a 4-step procedure for sense-making in
argumentative discussions. We test our procedure through studying a
real-world use case: information quality discussions in Wikipedia
concerning whether a particular topic should be covered in the
encyclopedia. We characterize the workflow and information needs of
participants and decision-makers, structure arguments to support human
reasoning, and create a task-based interface that supports
consensus-finding for deletion discussions in the English-language
Wikipedia. In a user-based evaluation, our interface provides
statistically significant improvements over the native Wikipedia
discussion interface in terms of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of
use, and information completeness. In a pilot study, 16 of 19
participants (84%) preferred our argumentation support interface over
the native Wikipedia discussion interface.
Supplementary materials:
- Data (source: Wikipedia Articles for Deletion 2011-01-29 (html))
- Decision Factors Annotated data GATE datastore, assumes you have GATE software installed. If you have trouble, opening this data in GATE, check screenshots then contact me! (And for more details about the process and results see WikiSym 2012, Annotation chapter of thesis, and Annotation appendix to thesis.)
- Walton's argumentation schemes annotated data. XML dumps (zip) Alternately, the two source archives (first, second) are available, assuming you have CorpusTool software installed. (And for more details about the process and results see CSCW 2013, Annotation chapter of thesis, and Annotation appendix to thesis.)
- Source data (Wikipedia Articles for Deletion 2011-01-29 (html)) html copy and PDF copy
- Ontology as Raw OWL and main site. And images of the ontology: case perspective, message perspective, and user perspective using VOWL (key).
- Link to website for user experiment (Experiment B has the code)
- Blog post about the Viva/Dissertation Defense including viva slides on Slideshare
- NUIG library has an identical copy of the thesis in the ARAN digital repository at http://hdl.handle.net/10379/4551.
Best link to this page: http://purl.org/jsphd
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