BETTER-MODS: Better informing citizens about current debates: Moderating and summarizing Online Discussions
The BETTER-MODS project is a collaboration between Tilburg University, the KNAW Meertens Institute, Utrecht University and NU.nl. It consists of two PhD projects, one at Tilburg University and one at the Meertens Institute, which both focus on improving the online discussion platform of NU.nl.
Moreover, the BETTER-MODS project is part of the NWO Digital Society – The Informed Citizen programme. The aim of this research programme is to ‘better match the use of digital techniques with societal preferences, needs and skills, and vice versa’. The BETTER-MODS project contributes to this goal by aiming to make online discussions more accessible. We believe that engaging in discussions enhances social cohesion and mutual understanding in society, as it allows people to learn from other viewpoints. However, the potential of online inclusive deliberation is not yet realized because the current moderation of discussions on news sites is not yet optimal for the more complex topics. For example, minority viewpoints often remain unnoticed due to the sheer volume of other messages. Therefore, in the BETTER-MODS project we study online discussions from NU.nl and aim to develop a tool that assembles different perspectives and presents them insightfully with the most constructive posts per viewpoint.
Researchers
Cedric Waterschoot (Ph.D. student), Institute for Language Sciences
Other project team members: Liesje van der Linden MA (Tilburg University), prof. dr. Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg University), dr. Florian Kunneman (Vrije Universiteit)
Academic supervisors
Prof. dr. Antal van den Bosch (ILS, Utrecht University)
Dr. Ernst van den Hemel (KNAW Meertens Instituut)
Grant funding agency; (co-)funding (non-)academic partners
Funded by NWO (grant number 410.19.006)
Co-funded by NU.nl / DPG Media (project partner)
Publications
- Waterschoot, C., van den Hemel, E., and van den Bosch, A. 2022. Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6715–6725, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Waterschoot, C., van den Bosch, A., and van den Hemel, E. Calculating Argument Diversity in Online Threads. In 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2021). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2021.