Title
Finding influential users of an online health community: a new metric based on sentiment influence
Abstract
What characterizes influential users in online health communities (OHCs)? We hypothesize that (1) the emotional support received by OHC members can be assessed from their sentiment ex-pressed in online interactions, and (2) such assessments can help to identify influential OHC members. Through text mining and sentiment analysis of users' online interactions, we propose a novel metric that directly measures a user's ability to affect the sentiment of others. Using dataset from an OHC, we demonstrate that this metric is highly effective in identifying influential users. In addition, combining the metric with other traditional measures further improves the identification of influential users. This study can facilitate online community management and advance our understanding of social influence in OHCs.
Year
Venue
DocType
2012
CoRR
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1211.6086
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kang Zhao111414.70
Greta E. Greer2483.36
Baojun Qiu321513.07
Prasenjit Mitra42439167.89
Kenneth Portier5483.36
John Yen623920.29