Extracting relational network from the online forums: Methods and applications

We study the problem of automatically extracting semantic information network and social network from the online forum. We describe an efficient system called INEOF which is capable of processing millions of forum posts in a few hours. We also introduce some applications, including topic detection and opinion leader detection based on social network analysis techniques after building the two type of relational networks. Experiments based on real forum data are given, and the results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our methodology.