Meeting support by visualizing discussion structure and semantics

We present a method for visualizing a structure of discussion in an electronic conference environment, and propose a prototype system. The system assists users to understand the transition of the argument and the whole structure of the argument by visualizing the relationship between utterances from the view points of the cause-and-effect and the semantics. The system provides the cause-and-effect view by using a tree structure, and semantic view by using a spring model. The transition from one view to other is seamless so as to enable users to keep track of thinking.