6,576 research outputs found
Analysis and Forecasting of Trending Topics in Online Media Streams
Among the vast information available on the web, social media streams capture
what people currently pay attention to and how they feel about certain topics.
Awareness of such trending topics plays a crucial role in multimedia systems
such as trend aware recommendation and automatic vocabulary selection for video
concept detection systems.
Correctly utilizing trending topics requires a better understanding of their
various characteristics in different social media streams. To this end, we
present the first comprehensive study across three major online and social
media streams, Twitter, Google, and Wikipedia, covering thousands of trending
topics during an observation period of an entire year. Our results indicate
that depending on one's requirements one does not necessarily have to turn to
Twitter for information about current events and that some media streams
strongly emphasize content of specific categories. As our second key
contribution, we further present a novel approach for the challenging task of
forecasting the life cycle of trending topics in the very moment they emerge.
Our fully automated approach is based on a nearest neighbor forecasting
technique exploiting our assumption that semantically similar topics exhibit
similar behavior.
We demonstrate on a large-scale dataset of Wikipedia page view statistics
that forecasts by the proposed approach are about 9-48k views closer to the
actual viewing statistics compared to baseline methods and achieve a mean
average percentage error of 45-19% for time periods of up to 14 days.Comment: ACM Multimedia 201
Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends
Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common
interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we
explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a
typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and
'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a
long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of
categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of
trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward
language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to
categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient
way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data,
enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to
quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among
others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with
each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many
were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating
from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013
(American Society for Information Science and Technology
Trends in Social Media : Persistence and Decay
Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an
incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few
topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become
temporal trends which are displayed to users. The question of what factors
cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not
been answered yet. In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending
topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation,
persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors
such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to
trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the
content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing
trends
A Data-driven Study of Influences in Twitter Communities
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular
micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl
several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5
million user profiles, along with 420.2 million directed relations and 105
million tweets among the users. User influence scores are obtained from
influence measurement services, Klout and PeerIndex. Our analysis reveals
interesting findings, including non-power-law influence distribution, strong
reciprocity among users in a community, the existence of homophily and
hierarchical relationships in social influences. Most importantly, we observe
that whether a user retweets a message is strongly influenced by the first of
his followees who posted that message. To capture such an effect, we propose
the first influencer (FI) information diffusion model and show through
extensive evaluation that compared to the widely adopted independent cascade
model, the FI model is more stable and more accurate in predicting influence
spreads in Twitter communities.Comment: 11 page
- …