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.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.105
Volume:
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:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2091–2126
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.105/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ming-Bin Chen, Lea Frermann, and Jey Han Lau. 2025. WHoW: A Cross-domain Approach for Analysing Conversation Moderation. In 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), pages 2091–2126, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WHoW: A Cross-domain Approach for Analysing Conversation Moderation (Chen et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.105.pdf