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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.”

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

6. 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

7. 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

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

9. Show When Interesting

10. 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