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。

顶评或踩评？预测和解释在线新闻讨论中的用户参与

Top Comment or Flop Comment? Predicting and Explaining User Engagement  in Online News Discussions

An important and difficult challenge in building computational models for
narratives is the automatic evaluation of narrative quality. Quality evaluation
connects narrative understanding and generation as generation systems need to
evaluate their own products. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring
annotations, we employ upvotes in social media as an approximate measure for
story quality. We collected 54,484 answers from a crowd-powered
question-and-answer website, Quora, and then used active learning to build a
classifier that labeled 28,320 answers as stories. To predict the number of
upvotes without the use of social network features, we create neural networks
that model textual regions and the interdependence among regions, which serve
as strong benchmarks for future research. To our best knowledge, this is the
first large-scale study for automatic evaluation of narrative quality.

本研究提出了使用社交媒体点赞数作为故事质量评估的一种方法，并利用神经网络来预测没有社交网络特征的点赞数，为未来的研究提供了强有力的基准。这也是关于叙述质量自动评估的首个大规模研究。