Research On Facilitator Support Systems For Group Argumentation Support Systems

The physical dispersion of current organizations, escalating complexity of problems and poor productivity of traditional meetings has lead to the increasing technological support to group collaboration, by means of Group Support Systems (GSS/GDSS), which was designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of group work by offering a variety of tools to assist the group in the structuring of activities, generating ideas and improving group communication. Despite the potential GSS has to provide great benefit to groups, GSS has not diffused widely in organizations. Experience and theory shows that implementing technology alone seldom is the answer to effective and efficient collaboration. Facilitation is one of the key success factors for effective electronic meetings. Despite the importance of facilitation to the success of GSS applications, most technology developments in the past did not focus on the facilitator. Only recently is research taking the direction of supporting the facilitator for three potential reasons:①the facilitator may be a bottleneck for the widespread diffusion of GSS;②increasingly use the distributed GSS, which are more difficult than face-to-face meetings for both participants and the facilitator; and③Facilitation is complex social-technology task, which need the knowledge of GSS and the group dynamics.Facilitation is a dynamic process that involves managing relationships between people, tasks and technology, as well as structuring tasks and contributing to the effective accomplishment of the meeting's outcome. It is an effect way to design and develop some suit tools to support facilitator to reduce complexity of facilitation. This dissertation argues that IT-based tools will improve the performance of facilitation. We provide a framework of how to sense, understand and respond, develop some tools, and then design some experiments to prove that these tools will enhance the ability of facilitator. The main contents and conclusions of this dissertation are listed as followed:1. Group members reach outside their boundaries, the need for computer-mediated collaboration increases. Previous researches focus on the small, face-to-face group meeting, which may be not able to support complex tasks. In a variety of domains, people develop routines to cope with complexity. In order to improve the ability of solving complex tasks and their productivity, and then derive more value from the GASS we design a conceptual framework for solving complex tasks based on group argument support systems (GASS), which divides the decision-making process into six phases based on the cognitive process of management and the skills & knowledge needed: generating motions, motions to tasks, tasks cognition & decomposition, sub-tasks to issues, issues solving and final decision-making.2. Facilitation is one of the key success factors for effective electronic meetings. However, facilitation is a very complex task requiring high experience on social dynamics and also a person knowledgeable of the GSS technology and the facilitator may be a bottleneck for the widespread diffusion of GSS. Hence, the requirement to develop effective support for the facilitator becomes critical. Firstly, this paper presented the conceptual framework of GASS, then designed a system to support the facilitator in the full meeting life cycle based on the GASS, and the implement alternatives for each module was discussed.3. Group argument support systems(GASS) is a effective support tool to gather public intelligence and form common wisdom. Weighting is an important hub to achieve conversion from qualitative to quantitative. In the context of public decision-making, in order to give the weight of the argument members in the open and loose structure of the organization, we analysis the new requirement and the limitation of the traditional methods, and then based on the weighting of position and the weighting of specialty, design the weighting of argument performance, which works as the periodic modify of the argument members'weighting. Experiment results indicate that the model has a precision of 80% and it is an effect indicator of the comments'value.4. Time and consensus are two important factors in the process of group decision. In this paper, an intelligent visualization technology to evaluating, forecasting and analyzing consensus is presented. On the base of strictly analyzing and designing the attributes, the structure and the relationships of argument information, according to semantic relationship, we advance the conception of consensus point aggregate, branching point aggregate, disputed point aggregate, and integrate four Indies of the consensus level and the consensus status, attention level and the attention status, consensus level trend, attention level trend, to build the model of intelligent visualization, then design and implement the visualization system, which based on the web, using the technology of Java & xml. Finally, using an example demonstrates the application of the visualization system, and designing a experiment to analyze the effect of intelligent visualization.5. In Group Argument Support Systems (GASS), the characteristics of parallel and anonymous data entry often result in Information overload and knowledge breakout while improving group performance. This research presented a automatic topic clustering tool to enhance participants'cognitive ability. First, we identified some challenges to automatic textual clustering. Then, we briefly reviewed the relative technologies, and described a textual analysis method involving Chinese segment, stop list and effective terms identification. Third, proposing a topic analysis method to obtain eigenvector. Fourth, using java, we designed and implemented a automatic clustering tool based on the self-Organization Map. Experiment indicated that the tool can achieve clustering recall of 0.35, clustering precision of 0.28 and clustering error of 0.83. Finally, we gave some discussions and future directions.