10,064 research outputs found
Viewpoint Discovery and Understanding in Social Networks
The Web has evolved to a dominant platform where everyone has the opportunity
to express their opinions, to interact with other users, and to debate on
emerging events happening around the world. On the one hand, this has enabled
the presence of different viewpoints and opinions about a - usually
controversial - topic (like Brexit), but at the same time, it has led to
phenomena like media bias, echo chambers and filter bubbles, where users are
exposed to only one point of view on the same topic. Therefore, there is the
need for methods that are able to detect and explain the different viewpoints.
In this paper, we propose a graph partitioning method that exploits social
interactions to enable the discovery of different communities (representing
different viewpoints) discussing about a controversial topic in a social
network like Twitter. To explain the discovered viewpoints, we describe a
method, called Iterative Rank Difference (IRD), which allows detecting
descriptive terms that characterize the different viewpoints as well as
understanding how a specific term is related to a viewpoint (by detecting other
related descriptive terms). The results of an experimental evaluation showed
that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on viewpoint discovery,
while a qualitative analysis of the proposed IRD method on three different
controversial topics showed that IRD provides comprehensive and deep
representations of the different viewpoints
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A niching memetic algorithm for simultaneous clustering and feature selection
Clustering is inherently a difficult task, and is made even more difficult when the selection of relevant features is also an issue. In this paper we propose an approach for simultaneous clustering and feature selection using a niching memetic algorithm. Our approach (which we call NMA_CFS) makes feature selection an integral part of the global clustering search procedure and attempts to overcome the problem of identifying less promising locally optimal solutions in both clustering and feature selection, without making any a priori assumption about the number of clusters. Within the NMA_CFS procedure, a variable composite representation is devised to encode both feature selection and cluster centers with different numbers of clusters. Further, local search operations are introduced to refine feature selection and cluster centers encoded in the chromosomes. Finally, a niching method is integrated to preserve the population diversity and prevent premature convergence. In an experimental evaluation we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and compare it with other related approaches, using both synthetic and real data
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