Extracting useful reply-posts for text forum threads summarisation using quality features and classification methods

Abstract

Text forums threads have a large amount of information furnished by users who discuss on a specific topic. At times, certain thread reply-posts are entirely off-topic, thereby deviating from the main discussion. It negatively affects the user's preference to continue replying to the discussion. Thus, there is a possibility that the user prefers to read certain selected reply-posts that provide a short summary of the topic of the discussion. The objective of the paper is to choose quality reply-posts regarding a topic considered in the initial-post, which also serve a brief summary. We offer an exhaustive examination of the conversational patterns of the threads on the basis of 12 quality features for analysis. These features can ensure selection of relevant reply-posts for the thread summary. Experimental outcomes obtained using two datasets show that the presented techniques considerably enhanced the performance in selecting initial-post replies pairs for text forum threads summarisation.