Title: Profanity use in online communities
Author Bios:
- Sara Sood-Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA
- Judd Antin-Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, California, United States
- Elizabeth Churchill-Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, California, United States
- Designing for improved social responsibility, user participation and content in on-line communities
- Automatic satire detection: are you having a laugh?
- A life-cycle perspective on online community success
- A multilevel analysis of sociability, usability, and community dynamics in an online health community
- User loyalty and online communities: why members of online communities are not faithful
Summary
In this study the authors took comments from a now non-existent website (Yahoo! Buzz) and had people comment on whether or not there was profanity in the comment or if it was an insult and if it was an insult who was it towards. They took about 6500 comments from that website and had about 200 people go through a few at a time and answer those 3 things, they had a thing called gold comments that had correct labels on them so they would know if the people were confused or not doing the study right. If they got too many of the gold comments wrong they would throw out their data. After they got the results from that they took lists from a couple of sites of profane language and setup a detection system so they could test how accurate the systems people employ now are.
Evaluation
To evaluate they took the answers from the people actually going through each comment and compared that data to the system that they set up to go through the comments. I would say that this is a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods since they got data by asking questions and compared the data using numbers. They found that the systems that websites use today aren't really as good as they need to be since they miss things that are spelled wrong or when people use symbols to finish spelling the words. They also explained why the current systems are not adequate.
Discussion
This was a little interesting but not much since it is obvious everywhere on the internet that people easily get by systems that ate supposed to find profanity and get rid of it. It was interesting to see why they miss those things though, I didn't know that they use set list that rarely get updated with the new slang that comes out all the time which makes sense since you always see people finding new ways to insult other people on forums and things like that. It also didn't seem very novel as they mentioned people who had already gone over some of this stuff.
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