WHoW: A Cross-domain Approach for Analysing Conversation Moderation
Ming-Bin Chen, Lea Frermann, Jey Han Lau
Abstract
We propose WHoW, an evaluation framework for analyzing the facilitation strategies of moderators across different domains/scenarios by examining their motives (Why), dialogue acts (How) and target speaker (Who). Using this framework, we annotated 5,657 moderation sentences with human judges and 15,494 sentences with GPT-4o from two domains: TV debates and radio panel discussions. Comparative analysis demonstrates the framework’s cross-domain generalisability and reveals distinct moderation strategies: debate moderators emphasise coordination and facilitate interaction through questions and instructions, while panel discussion moderators prioritize information provision and actively participate in discussions. Our analytical framework works for different moderation scenarios, enhances our understanding of moderation behaviour through automatic large-scale analysis, and facilitates the development of moderator agents.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chen-etal-2025-whow,
title = "{WH}o{W}: A Cross-domain Approach for Analysing Conversation Moderation",
author = "Chen, Ming-Bin and
Frermann, Lea and
Lau, Jey Han",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.105/",
pages = "2091--2126",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}