A Supervised Approach for Reconstructing Thread Structure in Comments on Blogs and Online News Agencies

El enfoque supervisado para reconstrucción de la estructura de hilos en comentarios en blogs y agencias de noticias en línea

Ali Balali¹, Hesham Faili², Masoud Asadpour³, and Mostafa Dehghani⁴

¹ School of ECE, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran balali.a67@ut.ac.ir

³ School of ECE, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran asadpour@ut.ac.ir

⁴ School of ECE, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran mo.dehghani@ut.ac.ir

Article received on 07/12/2012
Accepted on 16/01/2013.

Abstract

There is a great deal of knowledge in online environments such as forums, chats and blogs. A large volume of comments with different subjects on a page has created a lot of complexity in following the actual conversation streams, since the reply structures of comments are generally not publicly accessible in online environments. It is beneficial to automatically reconstruct thread structure of comments to deal with such a problem. This work focuses on reconstructing thread structures on blogs and online news agencies' comment space. First, we define a set of textual and non-textual features. Then we use a learning algorithm to combine extracted features. The proposed method has been evaluated on three different datasets, which include two datasets in Persian and one in English. The accuracy ratio of the proposed model is compared with three baseline algorithms. The results reveal higher accuracy ratio for the proposed method in comparison with the baseline methods for all datasets.

Keywords: Reconstructing thread structure, reply structure, information extraction, blogs and online news agencies, machine learning, information management.

Resumen

Una cantidad grande de conocimiento está hoy en línea en varias formas como foros, chats y blogs. El gran volumen de comentarios acerca de diversos temas en una página ha creado gran complejidad para realizar el seguimiento de los flujos reales de conversación, ya que las estructuras de respuesta a comentarios por lo general no son de acceso público en las páginas web. Sería beneficioso reconstruir automáticamente la estructura de hilos de comentarios para resolver este problema. El presente trabajo se centra en la reconstrucción de la estructura de hilos en el espacio de comentarios en blogs y agencias de noticias en línea. En primer lugar, se define el conjunto de características textuales y no textuales. Luego se utiliza un algoritmo de aprendizaje para combinar las características extraídas. El método propuesto ha sido evaluado sobre tres distintos conjuntos de datos, que incluye dos conjuntos de datos en idioma persa y un conjunto en inglés. La precisión del modelo propuesto se compara con tres algoritmos de referencia. Los resultados muestran mayor precisión del método propuesto en comparación con los métodos de referencia para todos los conjuntos de datos.

Palabras clave: Reconstrucción de la estructura de hilos, estructura de respuestas, extracción de información, blogs y agencias de noticias en línea, aprendizaje de máquina, administración de información.

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