What Makes Conversations Interesting What Makes Conversations Interesting? Themes, Participants, and Consequences of Conversations in Online Social Media Gregory Peaker

Overview This Research Paper is very well written Not a PhD Dissertation Good introduction in the Title Outline: Introduction Problem Formulation and Assumptions Themes, Interestingness, etc. Results Relevant Today

Introduction Rich Dialogue Structure (user A comments on the upload, user B comments on the upload, A comments in response to B’s comment, B responds to A’s comment etc.) Define interestingness – communication property that causes people to further participate in conversation A lot of work analyzing discussions or comments

Why Conversations Interesting People participate in conversations, why? They find the conversation theme interesting See comments by people that are well known in the community, or people that are directly known Participate in engaging dialogue “Goal is to determine a real scalar value corresponding to each conversations, as its measure of interestingness, in an objective manner.”

Applications Conversational interesting measure allow readers to read only interesting posts by applying an interestingness measure Predict web hosting requirements And many more

The Experiment Three step approach: Detect conversational themes Sophisticated Mixture Model Define assumptions and paramter estimated based on the Gnerealized Expectation Maximization Algorithm Interestingness Looks at Interestingness based on participants and conversations (why communicate?) Compute Interestingness Numbers Activity, Cohesiveness, Thematic Interestingness

Results Youtube Political section during 2008 US Presidential Election Lots of activity Many people usually not interesting talking, excited for politics Best time for Research Paper

Better than Baseline Researchers approach using three step model proved significantly better than Baseline

Show When Interesting

Conclusions Well Written Research Paper Set out to “determine a real scalar value corresponding to each conversation, as its measure of interestingness, an objective manner” Quantify interestingness, discuss reasons for changes, and why we’re interested