A Facilitator Support System that Overlooks Keywords Expressing the True Intentions of All Discussion Participants

This paper proposed the Keyword Movement Disclose System (KMDS), which allows a facilitator of discussion to watch a record of the moving keywords in a Discussion Board System (DBS). In the DBS, the discussion participants place each keyword in a box made for each item to be discussed. The keywords in the box were expected to show each participant’s opinion and intention, because the participant’s individual display was not disclosed to the other participants. Therefore, if the facilitator of the discussion can see the true opinions and intentions of all participants via the keywords in the boxes through the KMDS, the facilitator will be more appropriately advance the discussions and be able to draw conclusions based on diverse opinions. Moreover, the KMDS may contribute to the development of an artificial intelligence facilitator. In this paper, we conducted an experiment in which ten facilitators were asked to listen to a recorded discussion held by nine participants using the DBS. Five of the facilitators used the KMDS while listening the recorded discussion. It was suggested that KMDS may allow the facilitators to build a consensus from various viewpoints of the participants, although the results of the experiment did not show much difference depending on the conditions with/without KMDS.

@article{Oshima2021,
  title     = {A Facilitator Support System that Overlooks Keywords Expressing the True Intentions of All Discussion Participants},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {9},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Chika Oshima and Tatsuya Oyama and Chihiro Sasaki and Koichi Nakayama},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120906},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120906}
}