Overlapping Communities Generation for Online Support Forums

This paper presents a novel approach of overlapping communities generation for online support forums. Different from traditional online forums that provide the most similar or relevant information to respond to a user query, the approach proposed in this paper manages online forums and provides user support based on overlapping communities. Inspired by natural societies, a forum is deemed as a complex network in which all entities (keywords, posts and user) of an online forum are grouped into a series of communities that can share members with each other. To enable this, a kind of keyword association graph is constructed based on the co-occurrences of keywords in user posts. CPM (Clique Percolation Method) is then applied to discover closely connected cliques (core clusters) in the graph. The core keyword clusters absorb related posts and users to form communities and the communities are naturally overlapping. The communities are also extended to include other un-clustered but relevant posts and users so all entities in the forum belong to at least one community. Overlapping communities in online forums provide a useful means to support various services including recommendation, alerting and profiling customer support.