A Method to Discover Digital Collaborative Conversations in Business Collaborations

TL;DR

This paper presents a method that combines multiple conversation-threading techniques to reconstruct digital collaborative conversations across tools, enhancing understanding of document-related discussions in business collaborations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that integrates header, social, temporal, and semantic data to link and rebuild conversations from different digital tools.

Findings

Combining threading methods improves conversation detection.

Messaging and conferencing tools are used complementarily.

The approach effectively reconstructs related digital conversations.

Abstract

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.