Mining Social Networks in Message Boards

In the paper, we first present an approach to extract social networks from message boards on the Internet. Then we show structural features of 3,000 social networks extracted from 3,000 message boards from 15 categories in Yahoo!Japan Message Boards to prove the relationships between the features and the categories. After we classify social networks into three types (interactive communication, distributed expertise communication and soapbox communication), we suggest an approach for mining social networks to identify the types of communication, the roles of individuals, and important ties, all of which can be used to redesign the means communication as well as understand the state of communication.