Sung-Hwan Kim, Haesung Tak, Hwan-Gue Cho, Journal of Internet Computing and Services, Vol. 19, No. 5, pp. 89-96, Oct. 2018
10.7472/jksii.2018.19.5.89, Full Text:
Keywords: Internet Community, Online Discussion, Reply Tree, Bipartite Graph, Social Network

Abstract

In online communities, a large number of participants can exchange their opinion using replies without time and space restrictions. While the online space provides quick and free communication, it also easily triggers unnecessary quarrels and conflicts. The network established on the discussion participants is an important cue to analyze the confrontation and predict serious disputes. In this paper, we present a quantitative measure for polarity observed on the discussion network built from reply exchanges in online communities. The proposed method uses the comment exchange information to establish the user interaction network graph, computes its maximum spanning tree, and then performs vertex coloring to assign two colors to each node in order to divide the discussion participants into two subsets. Using the proportion of the comment exchanges across the partitioned user subsets, we compute the polarity measure, and quantify how discussion participants are bipolarized. Using experimental results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for detecting polarization and show participants of a specific discussion subject tend to be divided into two camps when they debate.

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