Conversation map: a content-based Usenet newsgroup browser

ABSTRACT

The Conversation Map system is a Usenet newsgroup browser that analyzes the text of an archive of newsgroup messages and outputs a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive. The system incorporates a series of novel text analysis procedures that automatically computes (1) a set of social networks detailing who is responding to and/or citing whom in the newsgroup; (2) a set of “discussion themes” that are frequently used in the newsgroup archive; and, (3) a set of semantic networks that represent the main terms under discussion and some of their relationships to one another. The text analysis procedures are written in the Perl programming language. Their results are recorded as HTML, and the HTML is displayed with a Java applet. With the Java-based graphical interface one can browse a set of Usenet newsgroup articles according to who is “talking” to whom, what they are “talking” about, and the central terms and possible emergent metaphors of the conversation. In this paper it is argued that the Conversation Map system is just one example of a new kind of content-based browser that will combine the analysis powers of computational linguistics with a graphical interface to allow network documents and messages to be viewed in ways not possible with today's, existing, format-based browsers which do not analyze the contents of the documents or messages.

REFERENCES

• 1: Michael R. Berthold , Fay Sudweeks , Sid Newton , Richard D. Coyne, “It makes sense”: using an autoassociative neural network to explore typicality in computer-mediated discussions, Network and Netplay: virtual groups on the Internet, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998
• 2: M.L. Best. "Corporal ecologies and population fitness on the net." Joumul ofArtificial Life, 3(4), 1998.
• 3: Steve Cannon and Gong Szeto, Parasite, http:Nparasite.io360.com/index.html and http:Nwww.cybergeography.org/atlas/topology.html, 1998.
• 4: Judith Donath , Karrie Karahalios , Fernanda B. Viégas, Visualizing Conversation, Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences-Volume 2, p.2023, January 05-08, 1999
• 5: Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers. "Running Out of Space: Models of Information Navigation." Short paper presented at HCl'94 (Glasgow, UK, 1994).
• 6: Christiane Fellbaum (editor) WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Dutabnse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
• 7: Gregory Grefenstette, Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 1994
• 8: Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English (New York: Longman, 1976).
• 9: Susan Herring, Deborah A. Johnson, Tamra DiBenedetto. "'This discussion is going too far!': Male resistance to female participation on the Internet" In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (editors) Gender Articulated: Lunguage and the Socially Constructed Serf (New York: Routledge, 1995).
• 10: Graeme Hirst and David St-Onge. "Lexical Chains as Representations of Context for the Detection and Correction of Malapropisms" in Christiane Fellbaum (editor) WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
• 11: Hitoshi Isahara , Hiromi Ozaku, Intelligent network news reader, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.237-240, January 06-09, 1997, Orlando, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/238218.238332]
• 12: Daniel Karp , Yves Schabes , Martin Zaidel , Dania Egedi, A freely available wide coverage morphological analyzer for English, Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics, August 23-28, 1992, Nantes, France [doi>10.3115/992383.992409]
• 13: Daniel C. Marcu , Graeme Hirst, The rhetorical parsing, summarization, and generation of natural language texts, 1998
• 14: George A. Miller, WordNet: a lexical database for English, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.11, p.39-41, Nov. 1995 [doi>10.1145/219717.219748]
• 15: M.R. Quillian "Semantic Memory" In M. Minsky (editor) Semantic Znformation Processing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).
• 16: Sheizaf Rafaeli , Fay Sudweeks, Interactivity on the Nets, Network and Netplay: virtual groups on the Internet, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998
• 17: Earl Rennison, Galaxy of news: an approach to visualizing and understanding expansive news landscapes, Proceedings of the 7th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.3-12, November 02-04, 1994, Marina del Rey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/192426.192429]
• 18: Jeffrey C. Reynar , Adwait Ratnaparkhi, A maximum entropy approach to identifying sentence boundaries, Proceedings of the fifth conference on Applied natural language processing, p.16-19, March 31-April 03, 1997, Washington, DC [doi>10.3115/974557.974561]
• 19: Warren Sack "Diagrams of Social Cohesion" In Descriptions of Demonstrated Systems, Associarion for Computationat Linguistics, ACL'99, University of Maryland, College Park, June 1999.
• 20: Warren Sack and Joseph Dumit, "Very Large Scale On-Line Conversations and Illness-based Social Movements," presented at the conference Mediu in Transition, MIT, Cambridge, MA, October 1999.
• 21: Beerud Sheth NEWT: A Learning Approach to Personalized Information Filtering, MIT Master's Thesis, 1993.
• 22: Marc Smith. "Netscan: Measuring and Mapping the Social Structure of Usenet" Presented at the 17th Annual Intematiqnal Sunbelt Social Network Corzjerence, Bahia Resort Hotel, Mission Bay, San Diego, California, February 13-16, 1997.
• 23: Kiyotaka Uchimoto, Hiromi Ozaku, and Hitoshi Isahara. "A Method for Identifying Topic-Changing Articles in Discussion-type Newsgroups within the Intelligent Network News Reader HISHO" In Proceedings of Natural L.anguuge Processing Pacific Rim Symposium, Phuket, Thailand, December 2-4, 1997.
• 24: Stanley Wasserman and Joseph Galaskiewicz (editors) Advances in Social Network Analysis: Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994).

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
computational linguistics, content-based browser, graphical interface, semantic navigation, semantic network, social navigation, social network, sociology, spatial navigation