2025 Volume 33 Pages 765-775
Online communication such as Slack is useful, but has the problem that it is difficult to understand the workplace situation and the status of employees, which are easy to understand in a traditional face-to-face environment. To solve this problem, we propose a method to visualize communication and identify lonely users. For visualizing online communication, we define two indices: Contribution Level, representing a user's contribution to communication, and Adjacency Level, representing the strength of relationships between users. For identifying and clearly visualizing lonely users, we apply clustering to the generated graph. To verify the validity of the proposed method, we analyzed data from our laboratory's Slack and conducted a survey using the UCLA Loneliness Scale and a subjective evaluation questionnaire for laboratory members. As a result, we concluded that users who communicate less online do not necessarily feel lonely, but it was also revealed that users with low scores on the UCLA Loneliness Scale had a significant difference in Adjacency Level compared to other users. It was suggested that the proposed system may be able to discover potential risks of loneliness.
