Conversations Gone Awry Dataset [Reddit CMV version]

A collection of conversations from the ChangeMyView (CMV) subreddit that derail into personal attacks (6,842 conversations, 42,964 comments).

Distributed together with: Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop. Jonathan P. Chang and Crisitan Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. EMNLP 2019.

Dataset details

Speaker-level information

Speakers in this dataset are Reddit users; their account names are taken as the user names.

Utterance-level information

Each utterance corresponds to a Reddit comment. For each utterance, we provide:

  • id: Reddit ID of the comment represented by the utterance

  • speaker: the speaker who authored the utterance

  • conversation_id: id of the first utterance in the conversation this utterance belongs to. Note that this differs from how ‘conversation_id’ is treated in ConvoKit’s general Reddit corpora: in those corpora a conversation is considered to start with a Reddit post utterance, whereas in this corpus a conversation is considered to start with a top-level reply to a post.

  • reply_to: Reddit ID of the utterance to which this utterance replies to (None if the utterance represents a top-level comment, i.e., a reply to a post)

  • timestamp: time of the utterance

  • text: textual content of the utterance

Metadata for each utterance is inherited from the general CMV corpus:

  • score: score (i.e., the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes) of the content

  • top_level_comment: the id of the top level comment (None if the utterance is a post)

  • retrieved_on: unix timestamp of the time of when the data is retrieved

  • gilded: gilded status of the content

  • gildings: gilding information of the content

  • stickied: stickied status of the content

  • permalink: permanent link of the content

  • author_flair_text: flair of the author

Conversational-level information

Metadata for each conversation include:

  • pair_id: the id of the conversation that this conversation is paired with

  • has_removed_comment: whether the final comment in this thread was removed by CMV moderators for violation of Rule 2

  • split: which split (train, val, or test) this conversation was used in for the experiments described in “Trouble on the Horizon”

Usage

To download directly with ConvoKit:

>>> from convokit import Corpus, download
>>> corpus = Corpus(filename=download("conversations-gone-awry-cmv-corpus"))

For some quick stats:

>>> corpus.print_summary_stats()
Number of Speakers: 9548
Number of Utterances: 42964
Number of Conversations: 6842

Contact

Please email any questions to: cristian@cs.cornell.edu (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil)