ASAP- An advanced system for assessing chat participants

Abstract

The paper presents a method and an implemented system for the assessment of the participants' competences in a collaborative environment based on an instant messenger conversation (chat). For each utterance in the chat, a score is computed that takes into account several features, specific to text mining (like the presence and the density of keywords, via synonymy), natural language pragmatics and to social networks. The total rating of the competence of a participant is computed considering the scores of utterances and inter-utterance factors. Within the frame of the developed system, special attention was given to multiple ways of visualizing the analysis' results. An annotation editor was also implemented and used in order to construct a "golden standard", which was further employed for the evaluation of the developed assessment tools. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.