Definition and Measures of an Opinion Model for Mining Forums

Online discussion systems in the form of forums have recently been analyzed by using graphs and social network techniques. Each forum is regarded as a social network and it is modeled by a graph whose vertices represent forum participants. In this paper, we focus on the structure and the opinion content of the forum posts and we are looking at the social network that is developed from a semantics point of view. We formally define an opinion-oriented model whose purpose is to provide complementary information to the knowledge extracted by the social network model. We define and present measures that can give important information regarding the opinion flow as well as the general attitude of users and towards users throughout the whole forum. Applying our model to a real forum found on the Web shows the additional information that can be extracted.