ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL NETWORK ON CYBER-ARGUMENTATION

Author

Bhargav Krishna Thota, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

12-1-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Liu, Xiaoqing

Abstract

Argumentation is one of the basic activities people perform in our society. People often spend a lot of time arguing about social, cultural, economic, financial, political, and other issues. Existing cyber-argumentation platforms facilitate large-scale discussions among participants and play an important role in the analysis of collective opinions and collective decision-making. However, they do not provide social networking capabilities and are not designed to be used in social networking environments. Social networks in argumentation platforms can reveal the patterns, shifts, and true relationships between the users in a discourse that influence the collective decision-making process, outlier opinions and so on. To this end, this research seek to address 1) Create a prototype of mobile application integrating social networking capabilities into cyber-argumentation platforms. 2) Assess the impact of social networks on the formation and evolution of collective opinion in argumentation. 3) Assess the impact of social networks on the formation of outlier opinions in argumentation by retrospective analysis. The proposed models and algorithm have been implemented within our intelligent cyber-argumentation system with social networking. These models were evaluated using empirical argumentation data and simulated social networking data. The empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of these proposed models and algorithms in cyber-argumentation with social networking.