Detecting Disagreement in Conversations using Pseudo-Monologic Rhetorical Structure
Kelsey Rebecca Allen, Giuseppe Carenini, Raymond T. Ng · 2014
Casual online forums such as Reddit, Slashdot and Digg, are continuing to in-crease in popularity as a means of com-munication. Detecting disagreement in this domain is a considerable challenge. Many topics are unique to the conversa-tion on the forum, and the appearance of disagreement may be much more sub-tle than on political blogs or social me-dia sites such as twitter. In this analy-sis we present a crowd-sourced annotated corpus for topic level disagreement detec-tion in Slashdot, showing that disagree-ment detection in this domain is difficult even for humans. We then proceed to show that a new set of features determined from the rhetorical structure of the con-versation significantly improves the per-formance on disagreement detection over a baseline consisting of unigram/bigram features, discourse markers, structural fea-tures and meta-post features. 1