Measuring user relevance in online debates through an argumentative model

Abstract Online debating forums are important social media for people to voice their opinions and engage in debates with each other. Measuring user relevance on these forums can be useful to identify different user profiles or behaviors in online debates, for example, users that tend to participate at the beginning of a debate and whose comments trigger participation, or users that post relevant comments but are not replied too much. To help users to distinguish such different user profiles, we propose graded measures based on users’ influence, the controversy that they generate throughout the debates, their contribution to the polarization of the debates, and their social acceptance, that we extract by analyzing the debates in which the users participate. Our approach is based on an argumentation-based analysis that represents a debate as a valued argumentation framework, in which comments of a debate are arguments, the attack relation between arguments models disagreement between comments, and values for arguments represent the overall support of users for comments. Finally, we test our measures with a sample of users from Reddit debates, identifying four main groups of users, from users with almost no impact on the debate to very active ones with decisive comments for the outcome of the debate.