Peral, Jesus, et al. "A review of the analytics techniques for an efficient management of online forums: An architecture proposal." IEEE Access 7 (2019): 12220-12240.

This paper addresses the challenges of managing online forums in e-learning environments, where vast amounts of unstructured messages can hinder the learning process. It reviews existing approaches and introduces a set of learning analytics techniques alongside a general architecture designed to enhance the efficiency of online courses. The proposed solutions focus on three key areas: 1) efficient tracking and monitoring of forum activity, 2) the development of effective search mechanisms for questions and answers, and 3) the extraction of relevant key performance indicators for better forum management. Techniques such as natural language processing, clustering, information retrieval, question answering, and data mining are employed to achieve these goals.