3,810 research outputs found
Predicting Successful Memes using Network and Community Structure
We investigate the predictability of successful memes using their early
spreading patterns in the underlying social networks. We propose and analyze a
comprehensive set of features and develop an accurate model to predict future
popularity of a meme given its early spreading patterns. Our paper provides the
first comprehensive comparison of existing predictive frameworks. We categorize
our features into three groups: influence of early adopters, community
concentration, and characteristics of adoption time series. We find that
features based on community structure are the most powerful predictors of
future success. We also find that early popularity of a meme is not a good
predictor of its future popularity, contrary to common belief. Our methods
outperform other approaches, particularly in the task of detecting very popular
or unpopular memes.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Proceedings of 8th AAAI Intl. Conf. on
Weblogs and social media (ICWSM 2014
Topicality and Social Impact: Diverse Messages but Focused Messengers
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high
influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter
hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as
#instantlyinlove? Questions like these demand a way to detect topics hidden
behind messages associated with an individual or a hashtag, and a gauge of
similarity among these topics. Here we develop such an approach to identify
clusters of similar hashtags by detecting communities in the hashtag
co-occurrence network. Then the topical diversity of a user's interests is
quantified by the entropy of her hashtags across different topic clusters. A
similar measure is applied to hashtags, based on co-occurring tags. We find
that high topical diversity of early adopters or co-occurring tags implies high
future popularity of hashtags. In contrast, low diversity helps an individual
accumulate social influence. In short, diverse messages and focused messengers
are more likely to gain impact.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
Predicting Rising Follower Counts on Twitter Using Profile Information
When evaluating the cause of one's popularity on Twitter, one thing is
considered to be the main driver: Many tweets. There is debate about the kind
of tweet one should publish, but little beyond tweets. Of particular interest
is the information provided by each Twitter user's profile page. One of the
features are the given names on those profiles. Studies on psychology and
economics identified correlations of the first name to, e.g., one's school
marks or chances of getting a job interview in the US. Therefore, we are
interested in the influence of those profile information on the follower count.
We addressed this question by analyzing the profiles of about 6 Million Twitter
users. All profiles are separated into three groups: Users that have a first
name, English words, or neither of both in their name field. The assumption is
that names and words influence the discoverability of a user and subsequently
his/her follower count. We propose a classifier that labels users who will
increase their follower count within a month by applying different models based
on the user's group. The classifiers are evaluated with the area under the
receiver operator curve score and achieves a score above 0.800.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 8 tables, WebSci '17, June 25--28, 2017, Troy,
NY, US
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
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Determining citizens’ opinions about stories in the news media: analysing Google, Facebook and Twitter
We describe a method whereby a governmental policy maker can discover citizens’ reaction to news stories. This is particularly relevant in the political world, where governments’ policy statements are reported by the news media and discussed by citizens. The work here addresses two main questions: whereabouts are citizens discussing a news story, and what are they saying? Our strategy to answer the first question is to find news articles pertaining to the policy statements, then perform internet searches for references to the news articles’ headlines and URLs. We have created a software tool that schedules repeating Google searches for the news articles and collects the results in a database, enabling the user to aggregate and analyse them to produce ranked tables of sites that reference the news articles. Using data mining techniques we can analyse data so that resultant ranking reflects an overall aggregate score, taking into account multiple datasets, and this shows the most relevant places on the internet where the story is discussed. To answer the second question, we introduce the WeGov toolbox as a tool for analysing citizens’ comments and behaviour pertaining to news stories. We first use the tool for identifying social network discussions, using different strategies for Facebook and Twitter. We apply different analysis components to analyse the data to distil the essence of the social network users’ comments, to determine influential users and identify important comments
De retibus socialibus et legibus momenti
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cutting edge topic. Almost everybody
--users, marketers, brands, companies, and researchers-- is approaching OSNs to
better understand them and take advantage of their benefits. Maybe one of the
key concepts underlying OSNs is that of influence which is highly related,
although not entirely identical, to those of popularity and centrality.
Influence is, according to Merriam-Webster, "the capacity of causing an effect
in indirect or intangible ways". Hence, in the context of OSNs, it has been
proposed to analyze the clicks received by promoted URLs in order to check for
any positive correlation between the number of visits and different "influence"
scores. Such an evaluation methodology is used in this paper to compare a
number of those techniques with a new method firstly described here. That new
method is a simple and rather elegant solution which tackles with influence in
OSNs by applying a physical metaphor.Comment: Changes made for third revision: Brief description of the dataset
employed added to Introduction. Minor changes to the description of
preparation of the bit.ly datasets. Minor changes to the captions of Tables 1
and 3. Brief addition in the Conclusions section (future line of work added).
Added references 16 and 18. Some typos and grammar polishe
Scalable Privacy-Compliant Virality Prediction on Twitter
The digital town hall of Twitter becomes a preferred medium of communication
for individuals and organizations across the globe. Some of them reach
audiences of millions, while others struggle to get noticed. Given the impact
of social media, the question remains more relevant than ever: how to model the
dynamics of attention in Twitter. Researchers around the world turn to machine
learning to predict the most influential tweets and authors, navigating the
volume, velocity, and variety of social big data, with many compromises. In
this paper, we revisit content popularity prediction on Twitter. We argue that
strict alignment of data acquisition, storage and analysis algorithms is
necessary to avoid the common trade-offs between scalability, accuracy and
privacy compliance. We propose a new framework for the rapid acquisition of
large-scale datasets, high accuracy supervisory signal and multilanguage
sentiment prediction while respecting every privacy request applicable. We then
apply a novel gradient boosting framework to achieve state-of-the-art results
in virality ranking, already before including tweet's visual or propagation
features. Our Gradient Boosted Regression Tree is the first to offer
explainable, strong ranking performance on benchmark datasets. Since the
analysis focused on features available early, the model is immediately
applicable to incoming tweets in 18 languages.Comment: AffCon@AAAI-19 Best Paper Award; Presented at AAAI-19 W1: Affective
Content Analysi
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