The article discusses the use of explicit replies as a tool for linguistic entrainment in online student debates. It observes how these replies influence the structure of conversations and the formation of reply-trees, which are often delineated by topic shifts. The authors use computational methods and information theory to study these coordination mechanisms and identify roles these utterances play in dialogues. They collected data from 25 multi-party student debates on the topic ‘Is being in love like a disease?’ in an online educational setting. They used a topic modelling algorithm to analyze the data and identify patterns in the conversations. The study also raises concerns about the decline in profound, meaningful conversations among youth due to the popularity of short-text communication platforms like Twitter and WhatsApp.
Publication date: 30 Nov 2023
Project Page: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18466v1
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.18466
