Conversation Derailment Forecasting with Graph Convolutional Networks

Enas Altarawneh, Ameeta Agrawal, Michael Jenkin, Manos Papagelis


Abstract
Online conversations are particularly susceptible to derailment, which can manifest itself in the form of toxic communication patterns like disrespectful comments or verbal abuse. Forecasting conversation derailment predicts signs of derailment in advance enabling proactive moderation of conversations. Current state-of-the-art approaches to address this problem rely on sequence models that treat dialogues as text streams. We propose a novel model based on a graph convolutional neural network that considers dialogue user dynamics and the influence of public perception on conversation utterances. Through empirical evaluation, we show that our model effectively captures conversation dynamics and outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the CGA and CMV benchmark datasets by 1.5\% and 1.7\%, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2023.woah-1.16
Volume:
The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Yi-ling Chung, Paul R{\"ottger}, Debora Nozza, Zeerak Talat, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani
Venue:
WOAH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
160–169
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.woah-1.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.woah-1.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Enas Altarawneh, Ameeta Agrawal, Michael Jenkin, and Manos Papagelis. 2023. Conversation Derailment Forecasting with Graph Convolutional Networks. In The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 160–169, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conversation Derailment Forecasting with Graph Convolutional Networks (Altarawneh et al., WOAH 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.woah-1.16.pdf