Featuring web communities based on word co-occurrence structure of communications
Yukio Ohsawa, Hirotaka Soma, Yutaka Matsuo, Naohiro Matsumura, Masaki Usui · 2002
Textual communication in message boards is analyzed for classifying Web communities. We present a communication-content based generalization of an existing business-oriented classification of Web communities, using KeyGraph, a method for visualizing the co-occurrence relations between words and word clusters in text. Here, the text in a message board is analyzed with KeyGraph, and the structure obtained is shown to reflect the essence of the content-flow. The relation of this content-flow with participants' interests is then formalized. Three structure-features of relations between participants and words, determining the type of the community, are shown to be computed and visualized: (1) centralization (2) context coherence and (3) creative decisions. This helps in surveying the essence of a community, e.g. whether the community creates useful knowledge, how easy it is to join the community, and whether/why the community is good for making commercial advertisement.