2015/04/28 by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei, Adrien Guille +3
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.3.5 #I.2.7 #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #Web visibility and informetrics #cs.CL #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1504.07459
arxiv created 2015/04/28 · openalex publication_date 2015/04/28 · arxiv updated 2015/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present CommentWatcher, an open source tool aimed at analyzing discussions on web forums. Constructed as a web platform, CommentWatcher features automatic mass fetching of user posts from forum on multiple sites, extracting topics, visualizing the topics as an expression cloud and exploring their temporal evolution. The underlying social network of users is simultaneously constructed using the citation relations between users and visualized as a graph structure. Our platform addresses the issues of the diversity and dynamics of structures of webpages hosting the forums by implementing a parser architecture that is independent of the HTML structure of webpages. This allows easy on-the-fly adding of new websites. Two types of users are targeted: end users who seek to study the discussed topics and their temporal evolution, and researchers in need of establishing a forum benchmark dataset and comparing the performances of analysis tools.