Predicting response to political blog posts with topic models

The models jointly describe the generation of the primary documents as well as the authorship and the contents of the blog community's verbal reactions to each post (comments) and evaluate their model on a novel comment prediction task.

Abstract

In this paper we model discussions in online political blogs. To do this, we extend Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al., 2003), in various ways to capture different characteristics of the data. Our models jointly describe the generation of the primary documents (posts) as well as the authorship and, optionally, the contents of the blog community's verbal reactions to each post (comments). We evaluate our model on a novel comment prediction task where the models are used to predict which blog users will leave comments on a given post. We also provide a qualitative discussion about what the models discover.