Web Forum Retrieval and Text Analytics: A Survey

This survey presents an overview of information retrieval, natural languageprocessing and machine learning research that makes use of forumdata, including both discussion forums and community questionansweringcQA archives. The focus is on automated analysis, withthe goal of gaining a better understanding of the data and its users.We discuss the different strategies used for both retrieval taskspost retrieval, question retrieval, and answer retrieval and classificationtasks post type classification, question classification, post qualityassessment, subjectivity, and viewpoint classification at the postlevel, as well as at the thread level thread retrieval, solvedness andtask orientation, discourse structure recovery and dialogue act tagging,QA-pair extraction, and thread summarisation. We also review workon forum users, including user satisfaction, expert finding, questionrecommendation and routing, and community analysis.The survey includes a brief history of forums, an overview of thedifferent kinds of forums, a summary of publicly available datasets forforum research, and a short discussion on the evaluation of retrievaltasks using forum data.The aim is to give a broad overview of the different kinds of forumresearch, a summary of the methods that have been applied, some insightsinto successful strategies, and potential areas for future research.