Analyzing Answers in Threaded Discussions Using a Role-Based Information Network

Online discussion boards are an important medium for collaboration. The goal of our work is to understand how messages and individual discussants contribute to Q&A discussions. We present a novel network model for capturing information roles of messages and discussants, and show how we identify useful answers to the initial question. We first classify information seeking or information providing roles of messages, such as question, answer or acknowledgement. We also identify user intent in the discussion as an information seeker or a provider. We capture such role information within a reply-to discussion network, and identify messages that answer seeker questions and how answers are acknowledged. Message influences are analyzed using B-centrality measures. User influences across different threads are combined with message influences. We use the combined score in identifying the most useful answer in the thread. The resulting ranks correlate with human provided ranks with an MRR score of 0.67.