BlogVox: Separating Blog Wheat from Blog Chaff

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2007-01-07

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Rights

This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.

Abstract

Blog posts are often informally written, poorly structured, rife with spelling and grammatical errors, and feature non-traditional content. These characteristics make them difficult to process with standard language analysis tools. Performing linguistic analysis on blogs is plagued by two additional problems: (i) the presence of spam blogs and spam comments and (ii) extraneous non-content including blog-rolls, link-rolls, advertisements and sidebars. We describe techniques designed to eliminate noisy blog data developed as part of the BlogVox system - a blog analytics engine we developed for the 2006 TREC Blog Track. The findings in this paper underscore the importance of removing spurious content from blog collections.