Participation Maximization Based on Social Influence in Online Discussion Forums Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2010-142 October 2010
Tao Sun, Wei Chen, Zhenming Liu, Yajun Wang, Xiaorui Sun, Ming Zhang, Chin-Yew Lin · 2010
In online discussion forums, users are more motivated to take part in discussions when observing other users’ participation | the efiect of social in∞uence among forum users. In this paper, we study how to utilize social in∞uence for increasing user participation in online forums. To do so, we propose the use of sidebars, which display forum threads to users, as a mechanism to maximize user in∞uence and boost participation. We formally deflne the participation maximization problem with the sidebar mechanism, based on the social in∞uence network. We show that it is a special instance of the social welfare maximization problem with submodular utility functions and it is NP-hard. However, generic approximation algorithms for social welfare maximization is too slow to be feasible for real-world forums. Thus we design a heuristic algorithm, named Thread Allocation Based on In∞uence (TABI), to tackle the problem. Through extensive experiments using a dataset from a real-world online forum, we demonstrate that TABI consistently outperforms all other algorithms, including a personalized recommendation algorithm, in increasing forum participation. The results of this work could facilitate other related studies such as designs for recommendation systems. The problem of participation maximization based on in∞uence also opens a new direction in the study of social in∞uence. Moreover, the proposed techniques can be applied to other social media, e.g., to maximize overall attention for advertisement in Facebook.