Towards modeling threaded discussions using induced ontology knowledge

Donghui Feng, Jihie Kim, Erin Shaw, Eduard Hovy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

Online discussion boards are a popular form of web-based computer-mediated communication, especially in the areas of distributed education and customer support. Automatic analysis for discussion understanding would enable better information assessment and assistance. This paper describes an extensive study of the relationship between individual messages and full discussion threads. We present a new approach to classifying discussions using a Rocchio-style classifier with little cost for data labeling. In place of a labeled data set, we employ a coarse domain ontology that is automatically induced from a canonical text in a novel way and use it to build discussion topic profiles. We describe a new classify-by-dominance strategy for classifying discussion threads and demonstrate that in the presence of noise it can perform better than the standard classify-as-a-whole approach with an error rate reduction of 16.8%. This analysis of human conversation via online discussions provides a basis for the development of future information extraction and question answering techniques.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 18th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, AAAI-06/IAAI-06
Pages1289-1294
Number of pages6
StatePublished - 2006
Event21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 18th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, AAAI-06/IAAI-06 - Boston, MA, United States
Duration: 16 Jul 200620 Jul 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume2

Conference

Conference21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 18th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, AAAI-06/IAAI-06
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston, MA
Period16/07/0620/07/06

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