Investigating the effect of discussion forum interface affordances on patterns of conversational interactions

  • Authors:

  • Yi-Chia Wang;Mahesh Joshi;Carolyn Penstein Rosé

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon Unievrsity, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We investigate how the affordances provided by alternative interfaces for on-line discussion forums affect the structure of the discourse that unfolds. In order to investigate this impact, we compare the predictive power of time related and text similarity related features for identifying parent-child links between messages. The results from this work using this methodology suggest that interfaces that make parent-child relationships between messages explicit and do not constrain the choice of previous messages that users can reply to allow patterns of conversational behavior that violate the assumptions of traditional, tree-structured models of discourse where time related and similarity related features are highly predictive. An implication for future work is that because there is evidence that interface affordances affect the form of conversational contributions, techniques that process on-line communication data may need to be adapted for different communication interfaces.