WHoW: A Cross-domain Approach for Analysing Conversation Moderation

TL;DR

WHoW is a versatile evaluation framework that analyzes moderation strategies across domains by examining motives, dialogue acts, and target speakers, enabling large-scale automatic analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces WHoW, a novel cross-domain framework for analyzing moderation strategies, validated through extensive annotation and comparative analysis across TV debates and radio discussions.

Findings

Moderation strategies differ significantly between debate and panel contexts.

The framework demonstrates strong cross-domain generalizability.

Automatic analysis reveals distinct moderation behaviors.

Abstract

We propose WHoW, an evaluation framework for analyzing the facilitation strategies of moderators across different domains/scenarios by examining their motives (Why), dialogue acts (How) and target speaker (Who). Using this framework, we annotated 5,657 moderation sentences with human judges and 15,494 sentences with GPT-4o from two domains: TV debates and radio panel discussions. Comparative analysis demonstrates the framework's cross-domain generalisability and reveals distinct moderation strategies: debate moderators emphasise coordination and facilitate interaction through questions and instructions, while panel discussion moderators prioritize information provision and actively participate in discussions. Our analytical framework works for different moderation scenarios, enhances our understanding of moderation behaviour through automatic large-scale analysis, and facilitates the development of moderator agents.