Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop

Understand

Online discussions often derail into toxic exchanges between participants.

• Recent efforts mostly focused on detecting antisocial behavior after the fact, by analyzing single comments in isolation.
• To provide more timely notice to human moderators, a system needs to preemptively detect that a conversation is heading towards derailment before it actually turns toxic.
• This means modeling derailment as an emerging property of a conversation rather than as an isolated utterance-level event.