Network Institute researchers Evgeny Vasilets, Tijs Van den Broek, Anna Wegmann, David Abadi, and Dong Nguyen explore the concept of perspective-getting to enhance interpersonal understanding in online discussions. Perspective-getting involves actively seeking information about another person’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and preferences. In contrast, perspective-taking is the cognitive process of imagining another’s perspective.

The authors developed an approach to measuring perspective-getting and applied it to English Wikipedia discussions. Then, they materialized the knowledge into a fine-tuned model, ultimately used to test whether perspective-getting is associated with discussion outcomes.

Key contributions:

• operationalization of perspective-getting by developing a codebook grounded in perspective-getting theory, used for categorizing behaviors
• usage of the codebook to annotate perspective-getting in Wikipedia discussion pages
• RoBERTa model fine-tuning

The research efforts were concretized in a workshop paper entitled Detecting Perspective-Getting in Wikipedia Discussions, published in The Sixth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. We invite you to learn more about their innovations and contributions through the publicly available paper at https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlpcss-1.1.pdf.