Discourse Structure Analysis of Chat Communication

This article presents a research method called Discourse Structure Analysis (DSA and a software application called ChatLine that supports the analysis of chat transcripts according to DSA. The DSA method is based on manual referencing and automatic analysis of chat transcripts in order to create visualizations and measures of their message and interaction structures. The goal of DSA is to provide a comprehensive and extensible method for the data‑driven analysis of chat logs that can support both qualitative and quantitative investigations of computer‑mediated communication.

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