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Abstract:
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What makes a user comment relevant for readers? In this paper, we investigate the structural aspects of user comments as they appear e.g. in the comment sections of news media websites. While other studies already have examined the deliberative quality of user comments across different media, it is not yet well understood how the structural features influence the perceived relevance of a comment. Our goal is to develop an understanding of the influence of various structural aspects like position and different kind of justifications on the perceived relevance of user comments. We approach this question by means of a user study. For this, we ask the participants to decide which of the shown user comments is more relevant in comparison with others. Our study shows that the perceived relevance follows some intuitive rules, e.g. adding more justifications increases the relevance. On the other hand, some results were also surprising, like simple statements without any insights are considered relevant by the users. Our results should support the development of proper metrics and algorithms for comment recommendation systems by providing an additional understanding.
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