Conference presentation
Discourse analysis of the digital reference service of the Internet Public Library
04 Oct 2012
Abstract
The use of interpersonal communications in online settings is becoming more common. Examining why patrons continually engage in dialogue with librarians can help improve the reference service and result in increased usage. In this study, we adopted four types of stylometric features (lexical, structural, sentimental, politeness) to analyze the discourse data from the question-answering service of the Internet Public Library (IPL)'s Online Reference Service (www.ipl.org). We compared librarians' responses that do not elicit subsequent queries from users with the ones that do elicit subsequent queries. Through the use of a Principle Component Analysis, we found specific sentimental features associated with dialogue containing subsequent queries from patrons.
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Details
- Title
- Discourse analysis of the digital reference service of the Internet Public Library
- Creators
- Erik Poole (Author) - Drexel UniversityJiexun Li (Author) - Drexel UniversityJung-ran Park (Author) - Drexel University
- Resource Type
- Conference presentation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science; College of Information Science and Technology (1995-2013)
- Other Identifier
- 991014632943904721