CommentWatcher: An Open Source Web-based platform for analyzing discussions on web forums

TL;DR

CommentWatcher is an open source web platform that automatically fetches, analyzes, visualizes, and models discussions on web forums, supporting both end users and researchers.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, HTML-structure-independent parser architecture for easy addition of new forums and provides comprehensive visualization and social network analysis tools.

Findings

Automates mass fetching of forum posts

Visualizes topics as expression clouds and their temporal evolution

Constructs social networks from user citation relations

Abstract

We present CommentWatcher, an open source tool aimed at analyzing discussions on web forums. Constructed as a web platform, CommentWatcher features automatic mass fetching of user posts from forum on multiple sites, extracting topics, visualizing the topics as an expression cloud and exploring their temporal evolution. The underlying social network of users is simultaneously constructed using the citation relations between users and visualized as a graph structure. Our platform addresses the issues of the diversity and dynamics of structures of webpages hosting the forums by implementing a parser architecture that is independent of the HTML structure of webpages. This allows easy on-the-fly adding of new websites. Two types of users are targeted: end users who seek to study the discussed topics and their temporal evolution, and researchers in need of establishing a forum benchmark dataset and comparing the performances of analysis tools.