Classifying help seeking behaviour in online communities

While help seeking has been extensively studied using self report survey data and models, there is a lack of content analysis techniques that can be directly applied to classify help seeking behaviour. In this preliminary work we propose a coding scheme which is then applied to an open dataset that we have created by carefully selecting sub groups from two popular discussion sites (Reddit and StackExchange). We then explore the possibility for automatically classifying help seeking behaviour using machine learning models. A preliminary model provides good initial results, suggesting that it may indeed be possible to construct student support systems that build off of an accurate classifier.