You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups

By Danyel Fisher, Marc A. Smith, Howard T. Welser. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06), 2006

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the social roles of the members a group can help to understand the social context of the group. We present a method of applying social network analysis to support the task of characterizing authors in Usenet newsgroups. We compute and visualize networks created by patterns of replies for each author in selected newsgroups and find that second-degree ego-centric networks give us clear distinctions between different types of authors and newsgroups. Results show that newsgroups vary in terms of the populations of participants and the roles that they play. Newsgroups can be characterized by populations that include question and answer newsgroups, conversational newsgroups, social support newsgroups, and flame newsgroups. This approach has applications for both researchers seeking to characterize different types of social cyberspaces as well as participants seeking to distinguish interaction partners and content authors.

Subfields: Communication, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5837314243fd9832f6769953063772e03bb4ea50

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Citations in the corpus

Lurking? cyclopaths?: a quantitative lifecycle analysis of user behavior in a geowiki (2010, background): “One prominent line of research seeks to assign users to different interaction roles, often through applying social network analysis [1, 7, 30].”
Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia (2009, background): “These patterns have been observed in diverse forms of online communities implemented in a variety of technologies, including social networks, forums, wikis, Usenet groups, and mailing lists [10] [14] [17] [23] [35].”
Statistical analysis of the social network and discussion threads in slashdot (2008, background): “The Netscan system [22], a powerful interface to track discussion threads and authors, has proven to be a valuable tool to understand different roles appearing in these newsgroups [6, 4].”
Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups (2006, background): “According to Smith and his colleagues (Brush, Wang, Turner, & Smith, 2005; Smith, 2004), online groups differ substantially in their likelihood of responding to the initial posts of newcomers; technical and illness support groups are among the most welcoming (Fisher, Smith, & Welser, 2006).”
Finding high-quality content in social media (2008, background): “From the scatter-plot in Figure 7, we observe that there are no clear roles of “asker” and “answerer” such as the ones identified by Fisher et al. [ 12 ] in USENET newsgroups.”
Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something (2008, background): “While one might expect a large question-answer forum to show a more diverse range of behavior than a narrowly focused software forum, we were nevertheless surprised to see the full range of topic and user types previously seen in general online newsgroups [7].”
Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites (2009, methodology): “These methods are based on one key insight: to understand a user's role in a social system, we might look at who that user interacts with, and how often [ 6 ].”
Research Note - The Impact of Community Commitment on Participation in Online Communities (2011, background): “Because of their sense of attachment and belonging, members who have a strong affective CC towards an online community are more apt to invest their time and effort helping others in the community by responding to their questions (e.g., Fisher et al. 2006, Wellman and Gulia 1999).”
Network Exchange Patterns in Online Communities (2011, background): “Recent research has noted that individual motivations (Ridings and Gefen 2004) and communication network structures (Fisher et al. 2006) differ based on online community topic.”
A Survey of Available Corpora For Building Data-Driven Dialogue Systems: The Journal Version (2015, methodology): “The corpus derived from these posts has been used for research in collaborative filtering (Konstan et al., 1997) and role detection (Fisher et al., 2006).”
Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites (2009, background): “The topic of the forum and the group’s interaction norms predict how this engagement will occur [21].”