A likelihood-based framework for the analysis of discussion threads

Online discussion threads are conversational cascades in the form of posted messages that can be generally found in social systems that comprise many-to-many interaction such as blogs, news aggregators or bulletin board systems. We propose a framework based on generative models of growing trees to a...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Gómez, Vicenç, Kappen, Hilbert J., Litvak, Nelly, Kaltenbrunner, Andreas
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10230/26746
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/26746
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11280-012-0162-8
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Discussion threads
Online conversations
Information cascades
Preferential attachment
Novelty
Maximum likelihood
Slashdot
Wikipedia
Descripción
Sumario:Online discussion threads are conversational cascades in the form of posted messages that can be generally found in social systems that comprise many-to-many interaction such as blogs, news aggregators or bulletin board systems. We propose a framework based on generative models of growing trees to analyse the structure and evolution of discussion threads. We consider the growth of a discussion to be determined by an interplay between popularity, novelty and a trend (or bias) to reply to the thread originator. The relevance of these features is estimated using a full likelihood approach and allows to characterise the habits and communication patterns of a given platform and/or community. We apply the proposed framework on four popular websites: Slashdot, Barrapunto (a Spanish version of Slashdot), Meneame (a Spanish Digg-clone) and the article discussion pages of the English Wikipedia. Our results provide significant insight into understanding how discussion cascades grow and have potential applications in broader contexts such as community management or design of communication platforms.