I want what I need! Analyzing subjectivity of online forum threads

Abstract

Online forums have become a popular source of information due to the unique nature of information they contain. Internet users use these forums to get opinions of other people on issues and to find factual answers to specific questions. Topics discussed in online forum threads can be subjective seeking personal opinions or non-subjective seeking factual information. Hence, knowing subjectivity orientation of threads would help forum search engines to satisfy user's information needs more effectively by matching the subjectivities of user's query and topics discussed in the threads in addition to lexical match between the two. We study methods to analyze the subjectivity of online forum threads. Experimental results on a popular online forum demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. © 2012 ACM.