Inquisitive Mind : A conversational news companion

With an ever-increasing amount of information and ever-more hectic lifestyles, many people rely on news briefs to stay up to date. Consequently, the reliance on single-source media narratives can lead to a biased and narrow perception of the world. Conversational interfaces, as a medium for delivering news stories, can help to address this problem by encouraging users to explore information resources and news stories by formulating curiosity driven comments and questions. We propose Inquisitive Mind (IM) - a conversational companion that proactively points out different narratives of the story, refers users to source materials, and encourages deeper exploration of the topic. We argue that IM could foster curiosity, encourage critical thinking, and effectively lead to more conscious media consumption

Affective Behaviour Analysis of On-line User Interactions: Are On-line Support Groups more Therapeutic than Twitter?

The increase in the prevalence of mental health problems has coincided with a growing popularity of health related social networking sites. Regardless of their therapeutic potential, On-line Support Groups (OSGs) can also have negative effects on patients. In this work we propose a novel methodology to automatically verify the presence of therapeutic factors in social networking websites by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The methodology is evaluated on On-line asynchronous multi-party conversations collected from an OSG and Twitter. The results of the analysis indicate that therapeutic factors occur more frequently in OSG conversations than in Twitter conversations. Moreover, the analysis of OSG conversations reveals that the users of that platform are supportive, and interactions are likely to lead to the improvement of their emotional state. We believe that our method provides a stepping stone towards automatic analysis of emotional states of users of online platforms. Possible applications of the method include provision of guidelines that highlight potential implications of using such platforms on users' mental health, and/or support in the analysis of their impact on specific individuals