Internet boards are platforms for online discussions about a variety of topics. On these boards, individuals may start a new thread on a specific matter, or leave comments in an existing discussion. The resulting collective process leads to the formation of 'discussion trees', where nodes represent a post and comments, and an edge represents a 'reply-to' relation. The structure of discussion trees has been analysed in previous works, but only from a static perspective. In this paper, we focus on their structural and dynamical properties by modelling their formation as a self-exciting Hawkes process. We first study a Reddit dataset to show that the structure of the trees resemble those produced by a Galton-Watson process with a special root offspring distribution. The dynamical aspect of the model is then used to predict future commenting activity and the final size of a discussion tree. We compare the efficiency of our approach with previous works and show its superiority for the prediction of the dynamics of discussion.
In addition, Ryosuke [26] and Medvedev REF also proposed different models to predict the temporal dynamics of main threads as a discussion tree.
Modelling structure and predicting dynamics of discussion threads in online boards
ArXiv
ArXiv
Mathematics Computer Science