Analysis of the temporal and structural features of threads in a mailing-list

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structural and temporal features of email threads in a mailing list by modeling them as link streams, extending graph concepts to better understand their density and connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces generalized notions of intra- and inter-community density for link streams and applies them to analyze email threads in the Debian mailing list.

Findings

Email threads are dense subsets within the link stream.

Threads are loosely connected from a link stream perspective.

Generalized density measures reveal structural properties of email interactions.

Abstract

A link stream is a collection of triplets $(t,u,v)$ indicating that an interaction occurred between $u$ and $v$ at time $t$. Link streams model many real-world situations like email exchanges between individuals, connections between devices, and others. Much work is currently devoted to the generalization of classical graph and network concepts to link streams. In this paper, we generalize the existing notions of intra-community density and inter-community density. We focus on emails exchanges in the Debian mailing-list, and show that threads of emails, like communities in graphs, are dense subsets loosely connected from a link stream perspective.