Abstract
In the divergence phase of a discussion, the accumulation of opinions from various perspectives becomes the foundation of leading the discussion to consensus. To promote the opinion generation in the online forum, facilitation is introduced and aims to encourage participants to generate posts as many as they can. Most online forum facilitation is conducted by few independent human facilitators. Therefore, problems such as human bias and facilitation scalability become inevitable. To tackle these problems, automated facilitation support approaches such as experience-based approaches and argumentation-based approaches have been proposed. However, most of these research modeled the facilitation issues by only focusing on the discussion contents while less research analyzes the facilitation paradigm from human facilitators consideration perspective. To fill this research gap, we proposed to model the human facilitator-based facilitation paradigm that aims to promote post generation in the online forum divergence phase. And the proposed models are validated from the facilitation generated in the human facilitator involved real-world online forum discussions.
