A Method to Discover Digital Collaborative Conversations in Business Collaborations

Many companies have a suite of digital tools, such as Enterprise Social Networks, conferencing and document sharing software, and email, to facilitate collaboration among employees. During, or at the end of a collaboration, documents are often produced. People who were not involved in the initial collaboration often have difficulties understanding parts of its content because they are lacking the overall context. We argue there is valuable contextual and collaborative knowledge contained in these tools (content and use) that can be used to understand the document. Our goal is to rebuild the conversations that took place over a messaging service and their links with a digital conferencing tool during document production. The novelty in our approach is to combine several conversation-threading methods to identify interesting links between distinct conversations. Specifically we combine header-field information with social, temporal and semantic proximities. Our findings suggest the messaging service and conferencing tool are used in a complementary way. The primary results confirm that combining different conversation threading approaches is efficient to detect and construct conversation threads from distinct digital conversations concerning the same document

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

Examining the Effects of Discussion Strategies and Learner Interactions on Performance in Online Introductory Mathematics Courses: An Application of Learning Analytics

This dissertation study explored: 1) instructors’ use of discussion strategies that enhance meaningful learner interactions in online discussions and student performance, and 2) learners’ interaction patterns in online discussions that lead to better student performance in online introductory mathematics courses. In particular, the study applied a set of data mining techniques to a large-scale dataset automatically collected by the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) for five consecutive years at a public university in the U.S., which included 2,869 students enrolled in 72 courses. First, the study found that the courses that posted more open-ended prompts, evaluated students’ discussion messages posted by students, used focused discussion settings (i.e., allowing a single response and replies to that response), and provided more elaborated feedback had higher students final grades than those which did not. Second, the results showed the instructors’ use of discussion strategies (discussion structures) influenced the quantity (volume of discussion), the breadth (distribution of participation throughout the discussion), and the quality of learner interactions (levels of knowledge construction) in online discussions. Lastly, the results also revealed that the students’ messages related to allocentric elaboration (i.e., taking other peers’ contributions in argumentive or evaluative ways) and application (i.e., application of new knowledge) showed the highest predictive value for their course performance. The findings from this study suggest that it is important to provide opportunities for learners to freely discuss course content, rather than creating a discussion task related to producing a correct answer, in introductory mathematics courses. Other findings reported in the study can also serve as guidance for instructors or instructional designers on how to design better online mathematics courses

Utilizing Multi-modal Weak Signals to Improve User Stance Inference in Social Media

Social media has become an integral component of the daily life. There are millions of various types of content being released into social networks daily. This allows for an interesting view into a users\u27 view on everyday life. Exploring the opinions of users in social media networks has always been an interesting subject for the Natural Language Processing researchers. Knowing the social opinions of a mass will allow anyone to make informed policy or marketing related decisions. This is exactly why it is desirable to find comprehensive social opinions. The nature of social media is complex and therefore obtaining the social opinion becomes a challenging task. Because of how diverse and complex social media networks are, they typically resonate with the actual social connections but in a digital platform. Similar to how users make friends and companions in the real world, the digital platforms enable users to mimic similar social connections. This work mainly looks at how to obtain a comprehensive social opinion out of social media network. Typical social opinion quantifiers will look at text contributions made by users to find the opinions. Currently, it is challenging because the majority of users on social media will be consuming content rather than expressing their opinions out into the world. This makes natural language processing based methods impractical due to not having linguistic features. In our work we look to improve a method named stance inference which can utilize multi-domain features to extract the social opinion. We also introduce a method which can expose users opinions even though they do not have on-topical content. We also note how by introducing weak supervision to an unsupervised task of stance inference we can improve the performance. The weak supervision we bring into the pipeline is through hashtags. We show how hashtags are contextual indicators added by humans which will be much likelier to be related than a topic model. Lastly we introduce disentanglement methods for chronological social media networks which allows one to utilize the methods we introduce above to be applied in these type of platforms

Rethinking Email Information Visualization: a case study

Quantas vezes a expressão "Uma imagem vale mais do que mil palavras" é usada no dia-a-dia? Uma representação gráfica de qualquer objeto é mais facilmente assimilada pelo cérebro humano do que a sua representação textual dado que a visão é o principal meio de transporte de informação para o cérebro, tanto em quantidade como em velocidade. E este principio pode ser aplicado em qualquer área. Nomeadamente na área da ciência onde cada vez mais é necessário analisar grandes quantidades de dados e tirar conclusões relevantes com eles. E estes conjuntos de dados eram visualizados de uma forma muito pobre até à pouco tempo, altura em que a área de \textit{Information Visualization} surgiu. Com a aplicação de um conjunto de técnicas e de principios o processo de aquisição de conhecimento pode ser facilitado de forma que o utilizador consiga adquirir mais informação e tirar melhores conclusões ao mesmo tempo que o seu esforço cognitivo diminui significativamente.Uma área onde a \textit{Information Visualization} pode ter impacto tremendo é a área do email. Como é sobejamente sabido, o email é um sistema de comunicação massivamente utilizado e em variadíssimos contextos. Ainda assim, o email, de uma forma geral, está parado no tempo, estando ainda assente na sua estrutura original de há 40 anos atrás. Isto indica que há uma necessidade de atualizar este sistema, analisando numa primeira fase quais são as ações que os utilizadores executam, quais as suas necessidades e depois adaptar o sistema, tendo em conta estes dados.Esta dissertação vai ter três partes distintas, sendo a primeira detalhar esta ainda pouco divulgada ciência. A segunda será investigar o sistema de email, apontando para quais são as suas principais lacunas e os novos usos que os utilizadores associam ao email que não estavam planeados na sua especificação original. Finalmente, a terceira parte consistirá em juntar os dois tópicos anteriores de forma a tentar atingir uma solução que impulsione o email a dar um passo em frente no sentido de voltar a fazer com que este sistema seja uma experiência agradável para o utilizador, tendo um cliente de email (atualmente ainda em desenvolvimento) como caso de estudo onde os protótipos aqui desenvolvidos possam ser integrados para que possam ser validados pelos seus utilizadores, sendo depois a opinião destes tida em conta para a melhoria destes protótipos.How many times has the phrase "An image's worth a thousand words" been used in the daily life? Indeed, a graphical representation of anything that surrounds us is much better assimilated by the human brain rather than a textual representation, because the vision is the sense that carries more information and faster to the brain. Therefore, this principle may be applied to anything, namely, in a scientific area where scientists have to deal with large sets of data. This datasets were visualized in a less capable way until a few years ago when the area of Information Visualization started to emerge and alerting the specialists to the fact that, with a set of techniques of principles, the cognitive process of acquiring information can be facilitated in such a way that the user can acquire more information and get a better insight over the data he's visualizing at the same time that the effort to perform this task is reduced.The aforementioned science, Information Visualization, can be applied to any field of study. And a particular field who can be tremendously improved with this relation is the email environment. As it is widely known, the email use is massified and it's one of the most used means of communication within several contexts. Still, besides this massification, the structure of email is still the same as it was 40 years ago. This points to a need of improving this system, analyzing first what are the actions that users execute, what are the user's needs and then adapting the email to the modern user.This dissertation is going to have three distinct parts being them, at first a description of this still not mainstream science that is Information Visualization, next present the results of a research over the email environment, pointing to which are its main gaps and the new features that users associate to it and finally, mix the two previous topics - using information visualization techniques to solve a subset, suited for this dissertation's timeframe, of email's problems - trying to achieve a solution that pushes the email system forward in the direction of making the use of the email, once again, a pleasant experience to the user, having a real email client - that's currently under development - as a case study so that all the work here developed can be validated in a real life scenario, with real users, having feedback and with that improve the prototypes meeting that way the users' needs

Online discussions through the lens of interaction patterns

Computer-mediated communication is arguably prevailing over face-to-face. However, many of the subtleties that make in-person communication personal, cues such as an ironic tone of voice or an effortless posture, are inherently impossible to render through a screen. The context vanishes from the conversation - what is left is therefore mostly text, enlivened by occasional multimedia. At least, this seems the dominant opinion of both industry and academia, that recently focused considerable resources on a deeper understanding of natural and visual language. I argue instead that richer cues are missing from online interaction only because current applications do not acknowledge them -- indeed, communication online is already infused with nonverbal codes, and the effort needed to leverage them is well worth the amount of information they carry. This dissertation therefore focuses on what is left out of the traditional definition of content: I refer to these aspects of communication as content-agnostic. Specifically, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, I formalize what constitutes content-agnostic information in computer-mediated communication, and prove content-agnostic information is as personal to each user as its offline counterpart. For this reason, I choose as a venue of research the web forum, a supposedly text-based, impersonal communication environment, and show that it is possible to attribute a message to the corresponding author solely on the basis of its content-agnostic features -- in other words, without looking at the content of the message at all. Next, I display how abundant and how varied is the content-agnostic information that lies untapped in current applications.To this end, I analyze the content-agnostic aspects of one type of interaction, the quote, and draw conclusions on how these may support discussion, signal user status, mark relationships between users, and characterize the discussion forum as a community. One interesting implication is that discussion platforms may not need to introduce new features for supporting social signals, and conversely social networks may better integrate discussion by enhancing its content-agnostic qualities. Finally, I demonstrate how content-agnostic information reveals user behavior. I focus specifically on trolls, malicious users that disrupt communities through deceptive or manipulative actions. In fact, the language of trolls blends in with that of civil users in heated discussions, which makes collecting irrefutable evidence of trolling difficult even for human moderators. Nonetheless, I show that a combination of content-agnostic and linguistic features sets apart discussions that will eventually be trolled, and reactions to trolling posts. This provides evidence of how content-agnostic information can offer a point of view on user behavior that is at the same time different from, and complementary to, that offered by the actual content of the contribution. Popular up and coming platforms, such as Snapchat, Tumblr, or Yik Yak, are increasingly abandoning persistent, threaded, text-based discussion, in favor of ephemeral, loosely structured, mixed-media content. Although the results of this dissertation are mostly drawn from discussion forums, its research frame and methods should apply directly to these other venues, and to a broad range of communication paradigms. Also, this is but a preliminary step towards a fuller understanding of what additional cues can or should complement content to overcome the limitations of computer-mediated communication