It pays to be picky: an evaluation of thread retrieval in online forums

Online forums host a rich information exchange, often with contributions from many subject matter experts. In this work we evaluate algorithms for thread retrieval in a large and active online forum community. We compare methods that utilize thread structure to a na¨ıve method that treats a thread as a single document. We find that thread structure helps, and additionally selective methods of thread scoring, which only use evidence from a small number of messages in the thread, significantly and consistently outperform inclusive methods which use all the messages in the thread. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Miscellaneous General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Experimentation Keywords online forums, message boards, thread search

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Jonathan L. Elsas, Jaime G. Carbonell
• Keywords: Information Retrieval, Online Forums, SIGIR 2009, Thread Retrieval, Thread Structure