Constructive Language in News Comments
Varada Kolhatkar, Maite Taboada · 2017
We discuss the characteristics of constructive news comments, and present methods to identify them.First, we define the notion of constructiveness.Second, we annotate a corpus for constructiveness.Third, we explore whether available argumentation corpora can be useful to identify constructiveness in news comments.Our model trained on argumentation corpora achieves a top accuracy of 72.59% (baseline=49.44%)on our crowdannotated test data.Finally, we examine the relation between constructiveness and toxicity.In our crowd-annotated data, 21.42% of the non-constructive comments and 17.89% of the constructive comments are toxic, suggesting that non-constructive comments are not much more toxic than constructive comments.