Interdisciplinary Contributions to Flame Modeling

The world-wide emerging e-society generates new ways to communicate among people with different cultures and backgrounds. Communication systems as forums, blogs, and comments are widely used being easily accessible to end users. Studying and interpreting user generated data/text available on the Internet is a complex and time consuming duty for any human analyst. This study proposes an interdisciplinary approach to modeling the flaming phenomenon (hot, aggressive discussions) in on-line Italian forums. The model is based on the analysis of psycho/cognitive/linguistic interaction modalities among participants to web communities and on state-of-the art machine learning techniques and natural language processing technology. This research gives the opportunity to better understand and model the dynamics of web forums, including the language involved, the interaction between users, the relation between topic and users, language intensity and differences in behavior by age and gender