A Computational Analysis of Collective Discourse

Vahed Qazvinian; Dragomir R. Radev

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arXiv · 1204.3498

A Computational Analysis of Collective Discourse

Vahed Qazvinian·Dragomir R. Radev

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Abstract

This paper is focused on the computational analysis of collective discourse, a collective behavior seen in non-expert content contributions in online social media. We collect and analyze a wide range of real-world collective discourse datasets from movie user reviews to microblogs and news headlines to scientific citations. We show that all these datasets exhibit diversity of perspective, a property seen in other collective systems and a criterion in wise crowds. Our experiments also confirm that the network of different perspective co-occurrences exhibits the small-world property with high clustering of different perspectives. Finally, we show that non-expert contributions in collective discourse can be used to answer simple questions that are otherwise hard to answer.

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Vahed Qazvinian, Dragomir R. Radev. 2012-04-16. A Computational Analysis of Collective Discourse. https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3498

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