Comment sections below online news articles enjoy growing popularity among
readers. However, the overwhelming number of comments makes it infeasible for
the average news consumer to read all of them and hinders engaging discussions.
Most platforms display comments in chronological order, which neglects that
some of them are more relevant to users and are better conversation starters.
In this paper, we systematically analyze user engagement in the form of the
upvotes and replies that a comment receives. Based on comment texts, we train a
model to distinguish comments that have either a high or low chance of
receiving many upvotes and replies. Our evaluation on user comments from
TheGuardian.com compares recurrent and convolutional neural network models, and
a traditional feature-based classifier. Further, we investigate what makes some
comments more engaging than others. To this end, we identify engagement
triggers and arrange them in a taxonomy. Explanation methods for neural
networks reveal which input words have the strongest influence on our model's
predictions. In addition, we evaluate on a dataset of product reviews, which
exhibit similar properties as user comments, such as featuring upvotes for
helpfulness.

本研究采用神经网络模型对用户评论进行了分析，跟踪评论获得的赞和回复，并基于这些信息区分出具有高或低赞回复概率的评论。研究表明，有助于激发用户互动的评论特征可以按照一定的分类学进行整理，神经网络在分析这种回归问题时表现出最好的性能。