Mining Social Deliberation in Online Communication - If You Were Me and I Were You

Social deliberative skills are collaborative life-skills. These skills are crucial for communicating in any collaborative processes where participants have heterogeneous opinions and perspectives driven by different assumptions, beliefs, and goals. In this paper, we describe models using lexical, discourse, and gender demographic features to identify whether or not participants demonstrate social deliberative skills from various online dialogues. We evaluate our models using three different corpora with participants of different educational and motivational levels. We propose a protocol about how to use these features to build models that achieve the best in-domain performance and identify the most useful features for building robust models in cross-domain applications. We also reveal lexical and discourse characteristics of social deliberative skills.