Ranking Radically Influential Web Forum Users

The growing popularity of online social media is leading to its widespread use among the online community for various purposes. In the recent past, it has been found that the web is also being used as a tool by radical or extremist groups and users to practice several kinds of mischievous acts with concealed agendas and promote ideologies in a sophisticated manner. Some of the web forums are predominantly being used for open discussions on critical issues influenced by radical thoughts. The influential users dominate and influence the newly joined innocent users through their radical thoughts. This paper presents an application of collocation theory to identify radically influential users in web forums. The radicalness of a user is captured by a measure based on the degree of match of the commented posts with a threat list. Eleven different collocation metrics are formulated to identify the association among users, and they are finally embedded in a customized PageRank algorithm to generate a ranked list of radically influential users. The experiments are conducted on a standard data set provided for a challenge at ISI-KDD´12 workshop to find radical and infectious threads, members, postings, ideas, and ideologies. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the existing UserRank algorithm. We also found that the collocation theory is more effective to deal with such ranking problem than the textual and temporal similarity-based measures studied earlier.