A Text-based Model for Identifying Online Trust Relationships

Trust has been a long-standing issue in online communities and is gaining importance with the popularity of online social networks. Traditional trust models theorize and explain trust, but they do not directly provide operationalization of trust relationships. In view that the text is the dominant medium of online communication, this paper develops a text-based model for identifying online trust relationships. Building on organizational trust models, social exchange theory, and speech-act theory, the proposed model conceptualizes trust relationship as a sequence of speech acts. The model is validated with the data collected from a real-world online community. This research not only creates a text-based method for identifying online trust but also lays the groundwork for automated analysis of online trust.