Summarizing Online Forum Discussions – Can Dialog Acts of Individual Messages Help?

Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2127–2131, October 25-29, 2014, Doha, Qatar. c⃝2014 Association for Computational Linguistics Summarizing Online Forum Discussions – Can Dialog Acts of Individual Messages Help? Sumit Bhatia1, Prakhar Biyani2 and Prasenjit Mitra2 1IBM Almaden Research Centre, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95123, USA 2Information Science and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 sumit.bhatia@us.ibm.com, {pxb5080, pmitra}@ist.psu.edu Abstract A typical discussion thread in an online fo- rum spans multiple pages involving par- ticipation from multiple users and thus, may contain multiple view-points and so- lutions. A user interested in the topic of discussion or having a problem similar to being discussed in the thread may not want to read all the previous posts but only a few selected posts that provide her a concise summary of the ongoing discussion. This paper describes an extractive summariza- tion technique that uses textual features and dialog act information of individual messages to select a subset of posts. Pro- posed approach is evaluated using two real life forum datasets. 1 Introduction In recent times, online discussion boards (or fo- rums) have become quite popular as they provide an easily accessible platform to users in different parts of the world to come together, share informa- tion and discuss issues of common interest. The archives of web forums contain millions of discus- sion threads and act as a valuable repository of hu- man generated information that can be utilized for various applications. Oftentimes, the discussions in a thread span multiple pages involving partici- pation from multiple users and thus, may contain multiple view-points and solutions. In such a case, the end-user may prefer a concise summary of the ongoing discussion to save time. Further, such a summary helps the user to understand the back- ground of the whole discussion as well as provides an overview of different view-points in a time ef- ficient manner. In addition to generic forums on the web, automatic forum summarization methods can prove to be useful for various domain specific applications, such as helping students and support- ing tutors in virtual learning environments (Car- bonaro, 2010). A typical discussion thread in a web forum con- sists of a number of individual posts or messages posted by different participating users. Often, the thread initiator posts a question to which other users reply, leading to an active discussion. As an example, consider the discussion thread shown in Figure 1 where the thread starter describes his problem about the missing headphone switch in his Linux installation. In the third post in the thread, some other user asks about some clarifying details and in the next post the topic starter pro- vides the requested details that makes the problem clearer. On receiving additional details about the problem, some other user provides a possible so- lution to the problem (fifth post). The topic starter tries the suggested solution and reports his experi- ence in the next post (sixth post). Thus, we see that …

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