Determining leadership in contentious discussions

Participants in online decision making environments assume different roles. Especially in contentious discussions, the outcome often depends critically on the discussion leader(s). Recent work on automated leadership analysis has focused on collaborations where all the participants have the same goal. In this paper we focus on contentious discussions, in which the participants have different goals based on their opinion, which makes the notion of leader very different. We analyze discussions on the Wikipedia Articles for Deletion (AfD) forum. We define two complimentary models, Content Leader and SilentOut Leader. The models quantify the basic leadership qualities of participants and assign leadership points to them. We compare the correlation between the leaders´ rank produced by the two models using the Spearman Coefficient. We also propose a method to verify the quality of the leaders identified by each model.