Automatically Identifying Good Conversations Online (Yes, They Do Exist!).

Online news platforms curate high-quality content for their readers and, in many cases, users can post comments in response. While comment threads routinely contain unproductive banter, insults, or users “shouting” over each other, there are often good discussions buried among the noise. In this paper, we define a new task of identifying “good” conversations, which we call ERICs — Engaging, Respectful, and/or Informative Conversations. Our model successfully identifies ERICs posted in response to online news articles with F1 = 0.73 and F1 = 0.91 in debate forums.