Conversation Analysis Based on Interpersonal Relationship in Consensus Building

Abstract

Building consensus is a process in which participants start with various opinions and reach an agreement as far as possible. During a discussion, participants exhibit different stances such as agree or disagree at other's utterances. In this paper, a stance analysis of participants by combining BBS tree structure and participant relation graph is proposed. The stance change is measured by an approach of information theory. Finally, simulations are provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.