Automatic Throwing of Questions Generated from Posted Comments to Activate Text Based Discussions

It is more difficult to activate text based discussions than face-to-face discussions because participants tend to hesitate give their opinions. To activate text based discussions, it is necessary for participants to give their opinions many times. We suppose that participants will give their opinions if questions are thrown to discussions. This paper proposes an agent that throws questions automatically in text based discussions. The questions are generated from comments posted by discussion participants previously in a discussion. The agent chooses a comment including a word that appears frequently in previous posted comments. The agent adds “why” or “how” to the beginning of the chosen comment, then the agent throws the comment as a question to the discussion participants. We experimentally verified that the agent could activate discussions by throwing questions.