The Utility of Discourse Structure in Identifying Resolved Threads in Technical User Forums

Online discussion forums are a valuable means for users to resolve specific information needs, both interactively for the participants and statically for users who search/browse over historical thread data. However, the complex structure of forum threads can make it difficult for users to extract relevant information. Automatically identifying whether the problem in a thread has been solved or not can help direct users to threads where the original problem has been solved, hence enhancing their prospects of solving their particular problem. In this paper, we investigate the task of Solvedness classification by exploiting the discourse structure of forum threads. Experimental results show that simple features derived from thread discourse structure can greatly boost the accuracy of Solvedness classification, which has been shown to be very difficult in previous research.