user behavior in online forums 1

8/6/2019 User Behavior in Online Forums 1

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ECE697 Project

Deepak Unnikrishnan


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` Online forums

` Questions

` Data Collection and Analysis

` Results


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` Discussion sites in Internet

` Mostly user generated content

Question-Answers

Opinions

` Non-obvious relationships

between participants

` Limited information about users


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` Questions

Do people participating in online forums form

social bonds?

Is the interaction network similar to that observed in OSNs

(Facebook,Orkut, Blogs) ?

` Interestingly, online forums are not well-researched


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` User Grouping Behavior in Online Forums, Shi et al.,

KDD 2009 (UMich, Microsoft Research)

Focus on user joining behavior in forum communities

Information diffusion

Recommendation of communities to users

Limited discussion on network properties


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` Google Forums

http://www.google.com/support/forum/

HTML Content Easy to parse

Around 50 broad discussion topics

900,000 discussion threads


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` Account for 60% of total discussions


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` Top 5 discussed products

Gmail

Youtube Blogger

Adsense

Webmaster

~400,000 threads

~48,000 users


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` Crawl each product

` Represent interactions in a discussion category as

a directed graph

` Visualize using SocNetV[1], Gephi[2]

` Analyze data

[1]http://socnetv.sou

rcefo

rge.net/[2] http://gephi.org/


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` A starts a thread

` B, C reply to the thread

` A replies to thread

` Thickness -> Frequency of replies

` Similar to Blog networks[1]

A

B C

[1]Communication Dynamics of Blog Networks, Goldberg et al., KDD08


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Topic - Adding adsense to a site


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` Most users dont participate in related discussions


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Gmail Youtube Blogger Adsense

Indegree

Outdegree

Indegree Outdegree

Gmail 4.06 4.05

Youtube 4.7 3.8

Blogger 4.95 3.7

Adsense 4.8 3.4


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[1] Measurement and analysis of online social networks, Mislove et al. IMC07


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` 20%-40% overlap in top 10% of nodes

` Overlap similar to the web than OSNs


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` Users inclined towards contributing to discussions than initiating one.

` Scope for recommendation systems 3%-20% Unanswered posts


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` Less than 1% of the total links are reciprocal

` Higher reciprocity observed in larger forums


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` Fairly sparse network 7-14 times sparser than OSNs

[1] Communication dynamics of blog networks, Goldberg et al. KDD08

[2] The Small World Web, Adamic et al. ECDL99[3] Measurement and analysis of online social networks, Mislove et al. IMC07


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` Forums exhibit low density in network structure


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Path length Diameter

Gmail forum 2.4 14

Youtube forum 2.88 9.6Blogger forum 2.24 11.3

Adsense forum 2.10 10.14

Flickr 5 27

LiveJournal 6 20

Orkut 4 9

Youtube 5 21


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` Similarities exist with OSNs

Users exhibit weak social bonds in online forums

Degrees obey power law

` Sparse network structure with similarities to web andblog networks

` Scope for recommendation systems

Recommending topic experts based on posts


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user behavior in online forums 1

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