Learning to Perform Moderation in Online Forums

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Learning to Perform Moderation in Online ForumsOnline discussion forums are a valuable resource for people looking to find information, discuss ideas, and get advice on the Internet. The number of forums continues to grow rapidly, covering such topics as politics, technical news and advice, medical issues, and product ratings and opinions. Unfortunately, many forums have too much activity, resulting in information overload. Moderation systems are implemented in some forums as a way to handle this problem, but due to sparsity issues, they are often not sufficient. This project is aimed at automating the moderation process, which currently relies entirely on humans. A framework for learning to perform machine moderation is developed by finding patterns in the moderations made by humans. Four fundamental research challenges are addressed: (1) Identify features that define a good or bad comment and develop methods to extract these features efficiently; (2) Develop classifiers that can be trained to moderate arbitrary comments with high accuracy; (3) Use the knowledge acquired in training on moderated forums in different, possibly unmoderated, forums; (4) Develop a system to combine human and machine moderation effectively. Millions of people already use online forums on a regular basis. This project will produce technology that will improve the quality of service provided to users of online forums and reduce the cost of operation by reducing substantially the amount of human moderation that is needed. The broader impact of the project includes training graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts, traditional and non-traditional dissemination effort involving deployment of the resulting technology, and a newly formed alliance with an international research team at INRIA, France.http://anytime.cs.umass.edu/shlomo/research/MODERATE.html