Finding Problem Solving Threads in Online Forum

Online forum is an important source that people use to find answers to questions. Most search engines simply retrieve “relevant” threads, but those are not necessarily good threads in terms of providing quality answers. In this paper we propose a two-step approach to classify online forum threads according to their informativeness in terms of question answering. We use statistical models to first categorize posts inside a thread. Then, a variety of features including post level information and other meta-data information are used to classify the thread. We show promising results using the online support forum data we have collected.