Reconstruction of Threaded Conversations in Online Discussion Forums

Abstract

Online discussion boards, or Internet forums, are a significant part of the Internet. People use Internet forums to post questions, provide advice and participate in discussions. These online conversations are represented as threads, and the conversation trees within these threads are important in understanding the behaviour of online users. Unfortunately, the reply structures of these threads are generally not publicly accessible or not maintained. Hence, in this paper, we introduce an efficient and simple approach to reconstruct the reply structure in threaded conversations. We contrast its accuracy against three baseline algorithms, and show that our algorithm can accurately recreate the in and out degree distributions of forum reply graphs built from the reconstructed reply structures.