Cooperative Discussion Support System by Visualizing Participant Contribution to Discussion

People often use Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and social networking services (SNSs) to discuss and obtain information from anonymous. They discuss which political party will win the first position, which country will win the most number of medals in Olympic Games, etc. Some of events held in the real world often tie up with BBSs and SNSs and people discuss the events using the environments on the Internet. The number of tie-ups will become bigger. For efficient discussion on the Internet as well as face-to-face discussion in the real world, it is desirable that participants should discuss cooperatively, and discussion results satisfied with by the participants should be obtained. Unfortunately, discussion on the Internet can be done by anonymous. Some of the anonymous participants tend to give negative comments and disapprovals to others. Such behaviors may prevent discussion participants from cooperative discussion or obtaining discussion results. A new method for cooperative discussion made by anonymous participants on the Internet is required. This paper proposes a new discussion support system. The proposed system supports participants in cooperative discussions. The proposed system evaluates participant contribution to discussion, and visualize it to the discussion participants. The participant contribution to discussion is defined as the degree of approvals in a discussion. We have developed the proposed system and evaluated the proposed system in an evaluation experiment. Experimental results showed that the proposed system could support cooperative discussions, and subjects in the experiment satisfied with obtained results in the discussions.