NesTPP: Modeling Thread Dynamics in Online Discussion Forums

TL;DR

This paper introduces NesTPP, a novel temporal point process model that captures the nested structure of threads and replies in online forums to better understand information spread and user behavior.

Contribution

It presents a new nested temporal point process model that explicitly models thread and reply interactions, improving the analysis of online discussion dynamics.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in modeling thread dynamics.

Provides competitive results on Reddit data.

Effectively captures correlations between main threads and replies.

Abstract

Online discussion forum creates an asynchronous conversation environment for online users to exchange ideas and share opinions through a unique thread-reply communication mode. Accurately modeling information dynamics under such a mode is important, as it provides a means of mining latent spread patterns and understanding user behaviors. In this paper, we design a novel temporal point process model to characterize information cascades in online discussion forums. The proposed model views the entire event space as a nested structure composed of main thread streams and their linked reply streams, and it explicitly models the correlations between these two types of streams through their intensity functions. Leveraging the Reddit data, we examine the performance of the designed model in different applications and compare it with other popular methods. The experimental results have shown that our model can produce competitive results, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in most cases.