Online discussion forums are considered a challenging repository for data mining tasks. Forums usually contain hundreds of threads which in turn consist of hundreds, or even thousands, of posts. Clustering posts can be used to discover outlier and off-topic posts and would provide better visualization and exploration of online threads.In this paper, we propose the Leader-based Post Clustering (...

12 Abstract A system for Banchored discussion^ is compared with a system for 13 traditional forum discussion (Blackboard), and their collaborative and communica14 tive affordances for the collaborative processing of academic texts are investigated. 15 Results show that discussion in the system for anchored discussion is more directed 16 at processing the meaning of texts than discussion in the ...

Online opinion leaders play an important role in the dissemination of information in discussion forums. They are a high-priority target group for viral marketing campaigns. On an average, an opinion leader will tell about his or her experience with a product or company to 14 other people. It is important to identify such opinion leaders from data derived from online activity of users. We presen...

Lately, asynchronous discussion forum is integrated in higher educational institutions as it may increase learning process, learners’ understanding, achievement and knowledge construction. The asynchronous discussion forum is used to complement the traditional, face-to-face learning session in hybrid learning courses. However, studies have proven that students’ engagement in online forums is st...

While discussion forums in online courses have been studied in the past, no one has proposed a model linking messages in discussion forums to a learning taxonomy, even though forums are widely used as educational tools in online courses. In this research, we view forums as information seeking events and use a keyword taxonomy approach to analyze a large amount of MOOC forum data to identify the...

We compare the use of edited text in the form of newswire and unedited text in the form of discussion forum posts as sources for training material in a self-training experiment involving the Brown reranking parser and a test set of sentences from an online sports discussion forum. We find that grammars induced from the two automatically parsed corpora achieve similar Parseval fscores, with the ...

This paper focuses on the impact of an asynchronous online discussion forum on the development of students’ ability in and attitudes toward writing in English. Two groups of third-year students (N = 60) majoring in English were assigned to two treatment and control groups, each receiving different types of feedback. Students in the treatment group were required to participate ...