The comment sections of online news platforms have shaped the way in which people express their opinion online. However, due to the overwhelming number of comments, no in-depth discussions emerge. To foster more interactive and engaging discussions, we propose our ComEx interface for the exploration of reader comments on online news platforms. Potential discussion participants can get a quick overview and are not discouraged by an abundance of comments. It is our goal to represent the discussion in a graph of comments that can be used in an interactive user interface for exploration.
To this end, a processing pipeline fetches comments from several different platforms and adds edges in the graph based on topical similarity or meta-data and ranks nodes on metrics such as controversy or toxicity. By interacting with the graph, users can explore and react to single comments or entire threads they are interested in.
