Mining Chat Discussions

Abstract

According to Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), the majority of the organizational knowledge comes from interactions between people. People tend to reuse solutions from other persons in order to gain productivity. When people communicate to exchange information or acquire knowledge, the process is named Collaboration. Collaboration is one of the most important tasks for innovation and competitive advantage within learning organizations (Senge, 2001). It is important to record knowledge to later reuse and analysis. If knowledge is not adequately recorded, organized and retrieved, the consequence is re-work, low productivity and lost of opportunities. Collaboration may be realized through synchronous interactions (e.g., exchange of messages in a chat), asynchronous interactions (e.g., electronic mailing lists or forums), direct contact (e.g., two persons talking) or indirect contact (when someone stores knowledge and others can retrieve this knowledge in a remote place or time). In special, chat rooms are becoming important tools for collaboration among people and knowledge exchange. Intelligent software systems may be integrated into chat rooms in order to help people in this collaboration task. For example, systems can identify the theme being discussed and then offer new information or can remember people of existing information sources. This kind of systems is named recommender systems. Furthermore, chat sessions have implicit knowledge about what the participants know and how they are viewing the world. Analyzing chat discussions allows understanding what people are looking for and how people collaborates one with each other. Intelligent software systems can analyze discussions in chats to extract knowledge about the group or about the subject being discussed. Mining tools can analyze chat discussions to understand what is being discussed and help people. For example, a recommender system can analyze textual messages posted in a web chat, identify the subject of the discussion and then look for items stored in a Digital Library to recommend individually to each participant of the discussion. Items can be electronic documents, web pages and bibliographic references stored in a digital library, past discussions and authorities (people with expertise in the subject being discussed). Besides that, mining tools can analyze the whole discussion to map the knowledge exchanged among the chat participants. The benefits of such technology include supporting learning environments, knowledge management efforts within organizations, advertisement and support to decisions.