mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey

arXiv 2503.01513 ↗First posted 3 Mar 2025cs.CLcited by 8

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present a survey of methods for assessing and enhancing the quality of online discussions, focusing on the potential of LLMs. While online discourses aim, at least in theory, to foster mutual understanding, they often devolve into harmful exchanges, such as hate speech, threatening social cohesion and democratic values. Recent advancements in LLMs enable artificial facilitation agents to not only moderate content, but also actively improve the quality of interactions. Our survey synthesizes ideas from NLP and Social Sciences to provide (a) a new taxonomy on discussion quality evaluation, (b) an overview of intervention and facilitation strategies, (c) along with a new taxonomy of conversation facilitation datasets, (d) an LLM-oriented roadmap of good practices and future research directions, from technological and societal perspectives.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 57 of its 175 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

Builds on

57 of 175 references.

References · 57

  1. 2022Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studiescited by 506
  2. 2019Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Languagecited by 377
  3. 2022Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systemscited by 300
  4. 2024LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individualscited by 235
  5. 2019What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgmentscited by 140
  6. 2014Long Short-Term Memory Based Recurrent Neural Network Architectures for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognitioncited by 111
  7. 2016Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussionscited by 106
  8. 2013A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factorscited by 104
  9. 2024A Comprehensive Survey on Process-Oriented Automatic Text Summarization with Exploration of LLM-Based Methodscited by 101
  10. 2024Systematic Biases in LLM Simulations of Debatescited by 98
  11. 2023Cooperation, Competition, and Maliciousness: LLM-Stakeholders Interactive Negotiationcited by 94
  12. 2021A Comprehensive Assessment of Dialog Evaluation Metricscited by 90
38 more
  1. 2024Non-Determinism of "Deterministic" LLM Settingscited by 84
  2. 2023Sensitivity, Performance, Robustness: Deconstructing the Effect of Sociodemographic Promptingcited by 80
  3. 2024Self-playing Adversarial Language Game Enhances LLM Reasoningcited by 80
  4. 2020GRADE: Automatic Graph-Enhanced Coherence Metric for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Systemscited by 76
  5. 2018Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failurecited by 73
  6. 2022Human Evaluation of Conversations is an Open Problem: comparing the sensitivity of various methods for evaluating dialogue agentscited by 62
  7. 2018Spread of hate speech in online social mediacited by 59
  8. 2021DynaEval: Unifying Turn and Dialogue Level Evaluationcited by 59
  9. 2022The Goldilocks of Pragmatic Understanding: Fine-Tuning Strategy Matters for Implicature Resolution by LLMscited by 57
  10. 2020Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialoguescited by 48
  11. 2023A Comprehensive Analysis of the Effectiveness of Large Language Models as Automatic Dialogue Evaluatorscited by 45
  12. 2024Can Unconfident LLM Annotations Be Used for Confident Conclusions?cited by 44
  13. 2023Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Computational Argumentationcited by 42
  14. 2019Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Developcited by 41
  15. 2023Opportunities and Risks of LLMs for Scalable Deliberation with Poliscited by 41
  16. 2021Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterancescited by 40
  17. 2022Toxicity Detection with Generative Prompt-based Inferencecited by 35
  18. 2024Bootstrapping LLM-based Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents via Self-Talkcited by 34
  19. 2021DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solvingcited by 26
  20. 2024Are Large Language Models Reliable Argument Quality Annotators?cited by 24
  21. 2019Something's Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Featurescited by 21
  22. 2024Can Language Models Recognize Convincing Arguments?cited by 21
  23. 2021I Beg to Differ: A study of constructive disagreement in online conversationscited by 18
  24. 2016Conversational Markers of Constructive Discussionscited by 17
  25. 2021Scientia Potentia Est -- On the Role of Knowledge in Computational Argumentationcited by 17
  26. 2018WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Communitycited by 16
  27. 2022Proactive Moderation of Online Discussions: Existing Practices and the Potential for Algorithmic Supportcited by 15
  28. 2022Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donaldcited by 13
  29. 2022Enabling Classifiers to Make Judgements Explicitly Aligned with Human Valuescited by 13
  30. 2023xDial-Eval: A Multilingual Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation Benchmarkcited by 13
  31. 2023Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?cited by 12
  32. 2020Is this Dialogue Coherent? Learning from Dialogue Acts and Entitiescited by 11
  33. 2024"Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet": An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms' Content Moderation Policiescited by 11
  34. 2024Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Empathetic Dialog Responsescited by 10
  35. 2020What Changed Your Mind: The Roles of Dynamic Topics and Discourse in Argumentation Processcited by 8
  36. 2020Defining and Quantifying Conversation Quality in Spontaneous Interactionscited by 8
  37. 2021Cross-Policy Compliance Detection via Question Answeringcited by 7
  38. 2022How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipediacited by 6

50 most cited of 57 All 57 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 5.

8 papers.

  1. 2025Designing Synthetic Discussion Generation Systems: A Case Study for Online Facilitationcited by 2
  2. 2025Question the Questions: Auditing Representation in Online Deliberative Processescited by 2
  3. 2026Trusted Weights, Treacherous Optimizations? Optimization-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLMscited by 1
  4. 2026The Deliberative Illusion: Diagnosing Factual Attrition and Stance Homogenization in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberationcited by 1
  5. 2025Computational Analysis of Conversation Dynamics through Participant Responsivitycited by 0
  6. 2026The geometry of online conversations and the causal antecedents of conflictual discoursecited by 0
  7. 2026Wait! There's a Way Out: A Decision Mechanism for Forecasting Conversational Derailmentcited by 0
  8. 2026To Facilitate or not to Facilitate: Human and LLM Facilitator Tendencies in Online Discussionscited by 0