Measuring the descriptiveness of web comments
Martin Potthast · 2009
This paper investigates whether Web comments are of descriptive nature, that is, whether the combined text of a set of comments is similar in topic to the commented object. If so, comments may be used in place of the respective object in all kinds of cross-media retrieval tasks. Our experiments reveal that comments on textual objects are indeed descriptive: 10 comments suffice to expect a high similarity between the comments and the commented text; 100-500 comments suffice to replace the commented text in a ranking task, and to measure the contribution of the commenters beyond the commented text.