Issues in reviewing on-line discussion logs and their solutions

Today´s computing and networking technologies allow people to have asynchronous on-line discussions by exchanging messages. Typical discussion base systems also provide discussion logs as archives or histories of the messages. Reviewing a discussion log raises several issues; the discussion log can include not only noteworthy messages but also worthless ones, while it does not include tacit understandings and external information mentioned by the discussion. The authors have been developing a system that implements techniques for solving these issues. This paper introduces the techniques implemented in the systems and describes the authors´ findings.