Collaborative Content-Based Method for Estimating User Reputation in Online Forums

Abstract : Collaborative ratings of forum posts have been successfully applied in order to infer the reputations of forum users. Famous websites such as Slashdot or Stack Exchange allow their users to score messages in order to evaluate their content. These scores can be aggregated for each user in order to compute a reputation value in the forum. However, explicit rating functionalities are rarely used in many online communities such as health forums. At the same time, the textual content of the messages can reveal a lot of information regarding the trust that users have in the posted information. In this work, we propose to use these hidden expressions of trust in order to estimate user reputation in online forums.