Towards modeling social and content dynamics in discussion forums

  • Authors:
  • Jihie Kim;Aram Galstyan

  • Affiliations:
  • Univesity of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA;Univesity of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA

  • Venue:
  • WSA '10 Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Linguistics in a World of Social Media
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the transformation of the World Wide Web from an information-gathering and processing tool into an interactive communication medium in the form of online discussion forums, chat--rooms, blogs, and so on. There is strong evidence suggesting that social networks facilitate new ways to interact with information in such media. Understanding the mechanisms and the patterns of such interactions can be important for many applications. Currently, there is not much work that adequately models interaction between social networks and information content. From the perspective of social network analysis, most existing work is concerned with understanding static topological properties of social networks represented by such forums. For instance, Park and Maurer (2009) applied node clustering to identify consensus and consensus facilitators, while Kang et al. (2009) uses discussion thread co-participation relations to identify (static) groups in discussions. On discussion content analysis research side, there have been approaches for classifying messages with respect to dialogue roles (Carvalho and Cohen, 2005; Ravi and Kim, 2007), but they often ignore the role and the impact of underlying social interactions.