Online community search using conversational structures

Online communities are valuable information sources where knowledge is accumulated by interactions between people. Search services provided by online community sites such as forums are often, however, quite poor. To address this, we investigate retrieval techniques that exploit the hierarchical thread structures in community sites. Since these structures are sometimes not explicit or accurately annotated, we introduce structure discovery techniques that use a variety of features to model relations between posts. We then make use of thread structures in retrieval experiments with two online forums and one email archive. Our results show that using thread structures that have been accurately annotated can lead to significant improvements in retrieval performance compared to strong baselines.