VisForum: A Visual Analysis System for Exploring User Groups in Online Forums

摘要

User grouping in asynchronous online forums is a common phenomenon nowadays . People with similarbackgrounds or shared interests like to get together in group discussions . As tens of thousands of archivedconversational posts accumulate , challenges emerge for forum administrators and analysts to effectively explore user groups in large-volume threads and gain meaningful insights into the hierarchical discussionsIdentifying and comparing groups in discussion threads are nontrivial , since the number of users and peincreases with time and noises may hamper the detection of user groups. Researchers in data mining fields have proposed a large body of algorithms to explore user grouping.