WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community

Yiqing Hua, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dario Taraborelli, Nithum Thain, Jeffery Sorensen, Lucas Dixon


Abstract
We present a corpus that encompasses the complete history of conversations between contributors to Wikipedia, one of the largest online collaborative communities. By recording the intermediate states of conversations - including not only comments and replies, but also their modifications, deletions and restorations - this data offers an unprecedented view of online conversation. Our framework is designed to be language agnostic, and we show that it extracts high quality data in both Chinese and English. This level of detail supports new research questions pertaining to the process (and challenges) of large-scale online collaboration. We illustrate the corpus’ potential with two case studies on English Wikipedia that highlight new perspectives on earlier work. First, we explore how a person’s conversational behavior depends on how they relate to the discussion’s venue. Second, we show that community moderation of toxic behavior happens at a higher rate than previously estimated.
Anthology ID:
D18-1305
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2818–2823
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1305
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1305
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiqing Hua, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dario Taraborelli, Nithum Thain, Jeffery Sorensen, and Lucas Dixon. 2018. WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2818–2823, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community (Hua et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1305.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/305892676
Data
WikiConv