Researchers seek early warnings of online nastiness

How they did it: The Cornell team studied some 1,200 conversations on Wikipedia Talk pages, reports MIT Tech Review, in a collaboration with researchers from Jigsaw and Wikimedia.

Among their findings:

• Cues of civil conversations include greetings and gratitude as well as opinions that are hedged.
• Conversations going bad feature sentences starting with the word "you," which signals potential trouble.

That won't surprise many of us: The researchers found that humans are still better at this than AI — a control group of humans detected a bad conversation in advance 72% of the time, compared with 61.6% for the AI.

• Yet if all humans were terrific at heading off online battles, we would not be in some of the mess we currently confront. In other words, early detection would be a good thing.

One bit of good news: In some of the conversations their AI had flagged, the humans eventually self-corrected.

• The paper concludes, "Interactions which initially seem prone to attacks can nonetheless maintain civility, by way of level-headed interlocutors, as well as explicit acts of reparation."