Understanding Influential Comments in Online Conversations

Abstract

Online communication has become common social activities in our daily lives. This paper investigates the roles of 'influential comments' that affect other comments in online communication. To this end, we collect and analyze a large-scale communication data from Reddit, which consists of 81 K news-related posts and their 3 M associated comments written by 400 K users. Using the collected data, we investigate how influential comments affect the follow-up comments in a communication in terms of (i) topic similarity and (ii) revealed sentiment. Our work reveals that influential comments tend to more affect their follow-up descendant comments than the post in terms of topic similarity and revealed sentiment.