English

A likelihood-based framework for the analysis of discussion threads

Social and Information Networks 2012-04-19 v1 Physics and Society

Abstract

Online discussion threads are conversational cascades in the form of posted messages that can be generally found in social systems that comprise many-to-many interaction such as blogs, news aggregators or bulletin board systems. We propose a framework based on generative models of growing trees to analyse the structure and evolution of discussion threads. We consider the growth of a discussion to be determined by an interplay between popularity, novelty and a trend (or bias) to reply to the thread originator. The relevance of these features is estimated using a full likelihood approach and allows to characterize the habits and communication patterns of a given platform and/or community.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1203.0652,
  title  = {A likelihood-based framework for the analysis of discussion threads},
  author = {Vicenç Gómez and Hilbert J. Kappen and Nelly Litvak and Andreas Kaltenbrunner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.0652},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

31 pages, 12 figures, journal

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:28:33.874Z