Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Science

Program

Computer Science

Supervisor

Dr. Robert E. Mercer

2nd Supervisor

Dr. Lu Xiao

Joint Supervisor

Abstract

With the thriving of online deliberation, Wikipedia's Article for Deletion (AfD) discussion has drawn a number of researchers' attention in the past decade. In this thesis we aim to solve two main problems: 1) how to help new users effectively participate in the discussion; and 2) how to make it efficient for administrators to make decision based on the discussion. To solve the first problem, we obtain a knowledge repository for new users by recognizing imperatives. We propose a method to detect imperatives based on syntactic analysis of the texts. And the result shows a good precision and reasonable recall. To solve the second problem, we propose a decision making support system that provides administrators with an reorganized overview of a discussion. We first divide the arguments in the discussion into several groups based on similarity; then further divide each group into subgroups based on sentiment (positive, neutral and negative). In order to classify sentiment polarity, we propose a recursive algorithm based on the dependency structure of the text. Comparing with the state of the art sentiment analysis tool by Stanford, our algorithm shows a promising result of 3-categories classification without requiring a large training dataset.

Download

Share

COinS