CommentWatcher: An Open Source Web-based platform for analyzing discussions on web forums
This tool addresses the problem of analyzing diverse and dynamic web forum discussions for end users studying topics and researchers needing benchmark datasets.
The authors developed CommentWatcher, an open-source web platform for analyzing discussions on web forums by automatically fetching posts, extracting topics, visualizing them as expression clouds and temporal evolution, and constructing user social networks from citations. The platform uses a parser architecture independent of HTML structure to handle diverse webpage structures and enable easy addition of new websites.
We present CommentWatcher, an open source tool aimed at analyzing discussions on web forums. Constructed as a web platform, CommentWatcher features automatic mass fetching of user posts from forum on multiple sites, extracting topics, visualizing the topics as an expression cloud and exploring their temporal evolution. The underlying social network of users is simultaneously constructed using the citation relations between users and visualized as a graph structure. Our platform addresses the issues of the diversity and dynamics of structures of webpages hosting the forums by implementing a parser architecture that is independent of the HTML structure of webpages. This allows easy on-the-fly adding of new websites. Two types of users are targeted: end users who seek to study the discussed topics and their temporal evolution, and researchers in need of establishing a forum benchmark dataset and comparing the performances of analysis tools.