Work

The conversationality index

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: There has been an explosion in social media use, with Statista estimating that worldwide, Facebook has over 3 billion regular active users, YouTube 2.5 billion, and Instagram and WhatsApp 2 billion ( Statista 2023 ). While social media allows one to connect and interact with a range of people, increased social media use can be associated with feelings of isolation and symptoms of depression and anxiety. This may in part be because it allows users to engage in activities that appear social but that do not provide meaningful social interaction. We developed the Conversationality Index to assess the quality of social media exchanges based on the length, number of participants and how equally the participants contribute to a written online conversation. After calibrating the Conversationality Index using real and surrogate data, we assessed conversations taken from a 33-million-word database and found that the Conversationality Index consistently distinguished between conversations of varying quality.

Source: Internet Pragmatics

DOI: 10.1075/ip.00119.cot

Authors: Louis Cotgrove, Rüdiger Thul, Kathy Conklin

Institutions: Heidelberg University, Leibniz Institute for the German Language, University of Nottingham

Language: English

Topic: Digital Communication and Language

Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W4407534755

FWCI:

Cites: 53

Cited by:

Related to: 10