De-escalation Bot
AI for a better discourse in online news fora

OFAI together with the Austrian (online) newspaper Der Standard developed the De-Escalation Bot, a series of machine learning based classifiers which scan forum postings for ones which are expected to provide valuable contributions to a forum and therefore should be visible not only for a rather short period of time but should be accessible to all users in a forum. The classifiers help forum moderators to identify such postings from a plethora of posts being produced by the forum users. Pinning respective posts on top of the forum has shown to improve the discussion quality.

One of the project's outputs is the "One Million Posts" corpus and an annotated data set consisting of user comments posted to an Austrian newspaper website (in German language), freely available for the research community.

Publications

• Dietmar Schabus and Marcin Skowron, Academic-Industrial Perspective on the Development and Deployment of a Moderation System for a Newspaper Website, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pp. 1602-1605, Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018.
• Dietmar Schabus, Marcin Skowron, Martin Trapp, One Million Posts: A Data Set of German Online Discussions Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp. 1241-1244, Tokyo, Japan, August 2017.

Links

• Annotated data set: "One Million Posts".
• derstandard.at Article about the project.
• Project overview: Google Digital News Initiative

Research staff

• Dietmar Schabus
• Marcin Skowron

Partners

• STANDARD Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H.

Sponsor