Early Warning Analysis for Social Diffusion Events

There is considerable interest in developing predictive capabilities for social diffusion processes, for instance to permit early identification of emerging contentious situations, rapid detection of disease outbreaks, or accurate forecasting of the ultimate reach of potentially viral ideas or behaviors. This paper proposes a new approach to this predictive analytics problem, in which analysis of meso-scale network dynamics is leveraged to generate useful predictions for complex social phenomena. We begin by deriving a stochastic hybrid dynamical systems (S-HDS) model for diffusion processes taking place over social networks with realistic topologies; this modeling approach is inspired by recent work in biology demonstrating that S-HDS offer a useful mathematical formalism with which to represent complex, multi-scale biological network dynamics. We then perform formal stochastic reachability analysis with this S-HDS model and conclude that the outcomes of social diffusion processes may depend crucially upon the way the early dynamics of the process interacts with the underlying network's community structure and core-periphery structure. This theoretical finding provides the foundations for developing a machine learning algorithm that enables accurate early warning analysis for social diffusion events. The utility of the warning algorithm, and the power of network-based predictive metrics, are demonstrated through an empirical investigation of the propagation of political memes over social media networks. Additionally, we illustrate the potential of the approach for security informatics applications through case studies involving early warning analysis of large-scale protests events and politically-motivated cyber attacks

Fine-Grained Emotion Analysis Based on Mixed Model for Product Review

Nowadays, with the rapid development of B2C e-commerce and the popularity of online shopping, the Web storages huge number of product reviews comment by customers. A large number of reviews made it difficult for manufacturers or potential customers to track the comments and suggestions that customers made. This paper presents a method for extracting emotional elements containing emotional objects and emotional words and their tendencies from product reviews based on mixed model. First we constructed conditional random fields to extract emotional elements, lead-in semantic and word meaning as features to improve the robustness of feature template and used rules for hierarchical filtering errors. Then we constructed support vector machine to classify the emotional tendency of the fine-grained elements to achieve key information from product reviews. Deep semantic information imported based on neural network to improve the traditional bag of word model. Experimental results show that the proposed model with deep features efficiently improved the F-Measure

All liaisons are dangerous when all your friends are known to us

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are used by millions of users worldwide. Academically speaking, there is little doubt about the usefulness of demographic studies conducted on OSNs and, hence, methods to label unknown users from small labeled samples are very useful. However, from the general public point of view, this can be a serious privacy concern. Thus, both topics are tackled in this paper: First, a new algorithm to perform user profiling in social networks is described, and its performance is reported and discussed. Secondly, the experiments --conducted on information usually considered sensitive-- reveal that by just publicizing one's contacts privacy is at risk and, thus, measures to minimize privacy leaks due to social graph data mining are outlined.Comment: 10 pages, 5 table

Using Technology Enabled Qualitative Research to Develop Products for the Social Good, An Overview

This paper discusses the potential benefits of the convergence of three recent trends for the design of socially beneficial products and services: the increasing application of qualitative research techniques in a wide range of disciplines, the rapid mainstreaming of social media and mobile technologies, and the emergence of software as a service. Presented is a scenario facilitating the complex data collection, analysis, storage, and reporting required for the qualitative research recommended for the task of designing relevant solutions to address needs of the underserved. A pilot study is used as a basis for describing the infrastructure and services required to realize this scenario. Implications for innovation of enhanced forms of qualitative research are presented

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform

Leveraging writing systems changes for deep learning based Chinese affective analysis

Affective analysis of social media text is in great demand. Online text written in Chinese communities often contains mixed scripts including major text written in Chinese, an ideograph-based writing system, and minor text using Latin letters, an alphabet-based writing system. This phenomenon is referred to as writing systems changes (WSCs). Past studies have shown that WSCs often reflect unfiltered immediate affections. However, the use of WSCs poses more challenges in Natural Language Processing tasks because WSCs can break the syntax of the major text. In this work, we present our work to use WSCs as an effective feature in a hybrid deep learning model with attention network. The WSCs scripts are first identified by their encoding range. Then, the document representation of the text is learned through a Long Short-Term Memory model and the minor text is learned by a separate Convolution Neural Network model. To further highlight the WSCs components, an attention mechanism is adopted to re-weight the feature vector before the classification layer. Experiments show that the proposed hybrid deep learning method which better incorporates WSCs features can further improve performance compared to the state-of-the-art classification models. The experimental result indicates that WSCs can serve as effective information in affective analysis of the social media text