Forum-Oriented Research on Water Army Detection for Bursty Topics

Water army means a special group of online users who get paid for posting comments and new threads or articles on different online communities and websites for some hidden purposes. Due to the fact that the nature of the posting behavior of water army is not fully and understood, the driving force detection of the bursty topic for web forum is still a difficult problem to solve. According to the analysis of bursty topics evolution and the posting behavior of water army, it is found that the topics driven by water army exhibit the characteristics different from general topics in their latency stage. Based on this discovery, the paper proposes a novel bursty topic classification algorithm, based on SVM active learning, which transforms the water army detection issue to a SVM-based classification decision issue. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has higher detection accuracy and detection efficiency.