Recommendation in Internet Forums and Blogs

Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 257–265, Uppsala, Sweden, 11-16 July 2010. c⃝2010 Association for Computational Linguistics Recommendation in Internet Forums and Blogs Jia Wang Southwestern Univ. of Finance & Economics China wj96@sina.cn Qing Li Southwestern Univ. of Finance & Economics China liq t@swufe.edu.cn Yuanzhu Peter Chen Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland Canada yzchen@mun.ca Zhangxi Lin Texas Tech Univ. USA zhangxi.lin @ttu.edu Abstract The variety of engaging interactions among users in social medial distinguishes it from traditional Web media. Such a fea- ture should be utilized while attempting to provide intelligent services to social me- dia participants. In this article, we present a framework to recommend relevant infor- mation in Internet forums and blogs using user comments, one of the most represen- tative of user behaviors in online discus- sion. When incorporating user comments, we consider structural, semantic, and au- thority information carried by them. One of the most important observation from this work is that semantic contents of user comments can play a fairly different role in a different form of social media. When designing a recommendation system for this purpose, such a difference must be considered with caution. 1 Introduction In the past twenty years, the Web has evolved from a framework of information dissemination to a social interaction facilitator for its users. From the initial dominance of static pages or sites, with addition of dynamic content generation and pro- vision of client-side computation and event han- dling, Web applications have become a preva- lent framework for distributed GUI applications. Such technological advancement has fertilized vi- brant creation, sharing, and collaboration among the users (Ahn et al., 2007). As a result, the role of Computer Science is not as much of designing or implementing certain data communication tech- niques, but more of enabling a variety of creative uses of the Web. In a more general context, Web is one of the most important carriers for “social media”, e.g. In- ternet forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, instant mes- saging, and social networking. Various engaging interactions among users in social media differ- entiate it from traditional Web sites. Such char- acteristics should be utilized in attempt to pro- vide intelligent services to social media users. One form of such interactions of particular inter- est here is user comments. In self-publication, or customer-generated media, a user can publish an article or post news to share with others. Other users can read and comment on the posting and these comments can, in turn, be read and com- mented on. Digg (www.digg.com), Yahoo!Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com) and various kinds of blogs are commercial examples of self-publication. There- fore, reader responses to earlier discussion provide a valuable source of information for effective rec- ommendation. Currently, self-publishing media are becoming increasingly popular. For instance, at this point of writing, Technorati is indexing over 133 million blogs, and about 900,000 new blogs are created worldwide daily1. With such a large scale, infor- mation in the blogosphere follows a Long Tail Dis- tribution (Agarwal …

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