A Noun Phrase Analysis Tool for Mining Online Community Conversations

Online communities are creating a growing legacy of texts. These texts record conversation, knowledge exchange, and variation in topic and orientation as groups grow, mature, and decline; they represent a rich history of group interaction and an opportunity to explore the purpose and development of online communities. The problem is how to approach and make sense of the vast amount of data stored by these communities and to use that information for some useful outcome. In this paper we use automated processes, including natural language processing, to explore the case of text accumulated from bulletin board postings from eight iterations of an online class. The paper presents work done on creating and refining the natural language processing procedures used to examine these data, and a description of results so far from these examinations.