Automated Facilitation Support in Online Forum

Abstract

Online forum that gathers participants together to solve the common issues that they are facing is considered as a promising application of utilizing collective intelligence to solve complicated real-world problems.

To facilitate the discussions in online forum to proceed smoothly and to build consensus efficiently, human facilitators are introduced into the system.

With the increasing sophistication of online forum, human facilitators related problems such as human bias and restricted scale become critical.

Therefore, it is critical to explore approaches to support human facilitators in conducting facilitation.

However, most of the existing facilitation support techniques only support predefined facilitation tasks that could be defined by static rules.

In this research, we aim to explore potential solutions for supporting the human facilitators to conduct facilitation in online forum.

As the first step, we have proposed a case-based reasoning (CBR)-based framework that targets support facilitation by utilizing past successful facilitation experience.

Currently, our work is focusing on the specific facilitation task of detecting influential user in the online forum.

In the future work, we are planning to propose approaches of solving other specific facilitation tasks such as measuring the level of agreement and encouraging participants to reach a consensus.