Summarizing online forum discussions - Can dialog acts of individual messages help?

Abstract

A typical discussion thread in an online forum spans multiple pages involving participation from multiple users and thus, may contain multiple view-points and solutions. A user interested in the topic of discussion or having a problem similar to being discussed in the thread may not want to read all the previous posts but only a few selected posts that provide her a concise summary of the ongoing discussion. This paper describes an extractive summarization technique that uses textual features and dialog act information of individual messages to select a subset of posts. Proposed approach is evaluated using two real life forum datasets.