What’s Worthy of Comment? Content and Comment Volume in Political Blogs

In this paper we aim to model the relationship be- tween the text of a political blog post and the comment volume—that is, the total amount of response—that a post will receive. We seek to accurately identify which posts will attract a high-volume response, and also to gain insight about the community of readers and their interests. We design and evaluate variations on a latent- variable topic model that links text to comment volume.