Cover not available
Part of
Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 107–133

Chapter 4
Investigating reply relations on Wikipedia talk pages to reconstruct interactional strategies of Wikipedia authors

| Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
| Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
This chapter presents the annotation and analysis of interpretative reply relations on Wikipedia talk pages using data from the WikiDemoCorpus (WDC). Building on an approach of annotating interpretative reply relations to analyze these relations in Wikipedia talk page posts, the chapter presents nine reply relation categories found in the German WDC. Additionally, linguistic cues for each category and the Wikipedia discussion pages overall are explained in detail, illustrated through reply relation targets. The results of the linguistic annotation are threefold: First, we provide an annotation scheme that can be used by third parties to produce more data according to their needs. Second, we shed light on and quantify the numerous ways Wikipedia authors reply to each other’s posts on talk pages. Finally, we provide richly annotated data that can be used for further analyses, such as identifying interactional relations on higher levels or training tasks in machine learning algorithms.
Keywords: Wikipedia talk pages, reply relations, referencing strategies, interactional structures, computer-mediated communication, CMC
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and motivation
    • 2.1Wikipedia talk pages: Structure of posts
    • 2.2Interpretative reply relations
  • 3.Linguistic annotation
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Data: WikiDemoCorpus
    • 3.3Methodology: Annotation process and guidelines
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.04her
References (14)
References
Beißwenger, Michael. 2016. Praktiken in der internetbasierten Kommunikation. In Sprachliche und kommunikative Praktiken, Arnulf Deppermann, Helmuth Feilke & Angelika Linke (eds), 279–311. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beißwenger, Michael, Ermakova, Maria, Geyken, Alexander, Lemnitzer, Lothar & Storrer, Angelika. 2012. A TEI schema for the representation of computer-mediated communication. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 3. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferschke, Oliver, Gurevych, Iryna & Chebotar, Yevgen. 2012. Behind the article: Recognizing dialog acts in Wikipedia talk pages. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Avignon, France, Walter Daelemans (ed.), 777–786. Stroudsburg PA: ACL. 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024).
Herring, Susan C. & Woo Chae, Seung. 2021. Prompt-rich CMC on YouTube: To what or to whom do comments respond? In Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2021, 2906–2915. 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024). DOI logo
Imo, Wolfgang. 2017. Interaktionale Linguistik und die qualitative Erforschung computervermittelter Kommunikation. In Empirische Erforschung internetbasierter Kommunikation, Michael Beißwenger (ed.), 81–108. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landis, J. Richard & Koch, Gary G. 1977. The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33(1): 159–174. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laniado, David, Riccardo Tasso, Yana Volkovich & Andreas Kaltenbrunner. 2011. When the Wikipedians talk: Network and tree structure of Wikipedia discussion pages. In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 11), 177–184. Barcelona.Google Scholar
Lüngen, Harald & Herzberg, Laura. 2019. Types and annotation of reply relations in computer-mediated communication. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 7(2): 305–332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lüngen, Harald & Sperberg-McQueen, Michael. 2012. A TEI P5 document grammar for the IDS text model. In TEI and Linguistics. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 3. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pustejovsky, James & Stubbs, Amber. 2013. Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning. Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly Media.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. & Sacks, Harvey. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 8(4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2018. Shell nouns in English — A personal roundup. Caplletra. Revista Internacional de Filologia. 64(64): 109. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
WikiDemoCorpus in KorAP (Corpus analysis platform). 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024).
Wikipedia. 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024).