Moon, Seungwhan, Saloni Potdar, and Lara Martin. "Identifying student leaders from MOOC discussion forums through language influence." Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 workshop on analysis of large scale social interaction in MOOCs. 2014.

This paper explores how to identify student leaders in MOOC discussion forums by analyzing their influence on the language used by other students. It proposes a novel method for measuring language accommodation based on semantic topics and demonstrates that student leaders effectively coordinate language use. The method successfully distinguishes student leaders from two MOOC discussion forum datasets.