Web forum retrieval and text analytics: A survey

Abstract

This survey presents an overview of information retrieval, natural language processing and machine learning research that makes use of forum data, including both discussion forums and community questionanswering (cQA) archives. The focus is on automated analysis, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the data and its users. We discuss the different strategies used for both retrieval tasks (post retrieval, question retrieval, and answer retrieval) and classification tasks (post type classification, question classification, post quality assessment, subjectivity, and viewpoint classification) at the post level, as well as at the thread level (thread retrieval, solvedness and task o..