Colloquium is a document review software developed by Software Engineering at Maryland (SEAM). The original web app is designed to facilitate anonymous, but accountable peer review. Each user may upload a document, which can then be rated and reviewed by other users. Reviews can also be rated to assess the quality of a user's feedback. Through receiving ratings on documents and reviews, users build up a document score, which is the average rating on their documents, and a feedback score, which is the average rating of their feedback. The platform is meant to incentivize writing quality documents, as well as quality feedback, therefore leading to more significant publications.

BOTS! GROUPS! ADMINISTRATION! CONTENT RECOMMENDATION!

Our primary effort was to add machine learning bots to the software. These bots interact with the goal of promoting more informed discussion.

Our Bots

Summary Bot

The summary bot analyzes documents and uploads a bot-generated summary of the paper to the review section. This allows the user to get a feel for the topic of a document before reading it, or if the user is looking at a second or third (or so on) revision of a document, they may be reminded of the content before jumping back in. This allows us to prime users to comprehend the documents they read.

Tag Generation Bot

The tag generation bot analyzes the documents and adds relevant tags. This allows users to see document topics at a glance.

Spam "Jabberwocky" Detection Bot

Our spam detection bot will detect reviews that do not make sense. By default it just adds a reply notifying others of the nonsense, but this function could be leveraged for greater site moderation, and automatically remove nonsensical reviews.

Sentiment Analysis

Our sentiment analysis bot detects reviews that are overly positive or negative. If a reviews is overly positive, we ask the reviewer if they have any constructive criticism. Conversely, we ask the reviewer if they have anything nice to say if their review is overly negative.

Administrative features

Groups

Share your documents with a predetermined group of several people with a click of a button.

Content recommendation

Colloquium now keeps track of the tags of your viewed papers, and recommends you papers with similar tags. See the papers that are relevant to you.

Administration

Now, administrators may add bots, manage users, and import/export reputations to share between distinct instances of Colloquium.