Department of Computer Science

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Comment classification for an online news domain
(2014-12) Brand, Dirk; Van der Merwe, Brink
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In online discussion forums, comment moderation systems are often faced with the problem of establishing the value of an unseen online comment. By knowing the value of comments, the system is empowered to establish rank and to enhance the user experience. It is also useful for identifying malicious users that consistently show behaviour that is detrimental to the community. In this paper, we investigate and evaluate various machine learning techniques for automatic comment scoring. We derive a set of features that aim to capture various comment quality metrics (like relevance, informativeness and spelling) and compare it to content-based features. We investigate the correlation of these features against the community popularity of the comments. Through investigation of supervised learning techniques, we show that content-based features better serves as a predictor of popularity, while quality-based features are better suited for predicting user engagement. We also evaluate how well our classifier based rankings correlate to community preference.