Pursing power in Arabic on-line discussion forums

Abstract

We present a novel corpus for identifying individuals within a group setting that are attempting to gain power within the group. The corpus is entirely in Arabic and is derived from the on-line WikiTalk discussion forums. Entries on the forums were annotated at multiple levels, top-level annotations identified whether an individual was pursuing power on the forum, and low level annotations identified linguistic indicators that signaled an individuals social intentions. An analysis of our annotations reflects a high-degree of overlap between current theories on power and conflict within a group and the behavior of individuals within the transcripts. The described datasource provides an appropriate means for modeling an individual's pursuit of power within an on-line discussion group and also allows for enumeration and validation of current theories on the ways in which individuals strive for power.

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