A Latent Variable Model for Viewpoint Discovery from Threaded Forum Posts
Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang · 2013
Threaded discussion forums provide an im-portant social media platform. Its rich user generated content has served as an important source of public feedback. To automatically discover the viewpoints or stances on hot is-sues from forum threads is an important and useful task. In this paper, we propose a novel latent variable model for viewpoint discov-ery from threaded forum posts. Our model is a principled generative latent variable model which captures three important factors: view-point specific topic preference, user identity and user interactions. Evaluation results show that our model clearly outperforms a number of baseline models in terms of both clustering posts based on viewpoints and clustering users with different viewpoints. 1