Shopping for Top Forums: Discovering Online Discussion for Product Research
Venue
KDD SOMA 2010 Workshop on Social Media Analytics
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Jonathan Elsas, Natalie Glance
BibTeX
Abstract
In this paper we present a system for aiding consumers with their product research by providing access to community generated content. We focus specifically on online forums or message boards, which are particularly useful for product research. These web sites often host discussion among users with first-hand product experiences, expert users and enthusiasts.
The system presented here is designed to integrate with a shopping search portal, providing access to online forums that are likely to have a significant amount of discussion relating to a user's expressed interest in product brands and categories. We describe this system and present experiments showing that in the context of a shopping search engine, the proposed system is preferred or equivalent to results from a web search engine 80% of the time and achieves accuracy at the top ranked result of 85%.
