Online community search using thread structure

Online communities are valuable information sources where knowledge is accumulated by interactions between people. Search services provided by online community sites such as forums are often, however, quite poor. To address this, we investigate retrieval techniques that exploit the hierarchical thread structures in community sites. Since these structures are sometimes not explicit or accurately annotated, we use structure discovery techniques. We then make use of thread structures in retrieval experiments. Our results show that using thread structures that have been accurately annotated can lead to significant improvements in retrieval performance compared to strong baselines.