14,401 research outputs found
Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention
on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous
events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as
they are driven by activity in specific geographic areas that act as sources of
traffic and information flow. Taken independently, trends and geography have
been discussed in recent literature on online social media; although, so far,
little has been done to characterize the relation between trends and geography.
Here we investigate more than eleven thousand topics that trended on Twitter in
63 main US locations during a period of 50 days in 2013. This data allows us to
study the origins and pathways of trends, how they compete for popularity at
the local level to emerge as winners at the country level, and what dynamics
underlie their production and consumption in different geographic areas. We
identify two main classes of trending topics: those that surface locally,
coinciding with three different geographic clusters (East coast, Midwest and
Southwest); and those that emerge globally from several metropolitan areas,
coinciding with the major air traffic hubs of the country. These hubs act as
trendsetters, generating topics that eventually trend at the country level, and
driving the conversation across the country. This poses an intriguing
conjecture, drawing a parallel between the spread of information and diseases:
Do trends travel faster by airplane than over the Internet?Comment: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks,
pp. 213-222, 201
Measuring relative opinion from location-based social media: A case study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public
opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data
source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness.
Social media data with geotags provide new opportunities to unveil the
geographic locations of users expressing their opinions. This paper aims to
answer two questions: 1) whether quantifiable measurement of public opinion can
be obtained from social media and 2) whether it can produce better or
complementary measures compared to opinion polls. This research proposes a
novel approach to measure the relative opinion of Twitter users towards public
issues in order to accommodate more complex opinion structures and take
advantage of the geography pertaining to the public issues. To ensure that this
new measure is technically feasible, a modeling framework is developed
including building a training dataset by adopting a state-of-the-art approach
and devising a new deep learning method called Opinion-Oriented Word Embedding.
With a case study of the tweets selected for the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, we demonstrate the predictive superiority of our relative opinion
approach and we show how it can aid visual analytics and support opinion
predictions. Although the relative opinion measure is proved to be more robust
compared to polling, our study also suggests that the former can advantageously
complement the later in opinion prediction
Semantics-driven event clustering in Twitter feeds
Detecting events using social media such as Twitter has many useful applications in real-life situations. Many algorithms which all use different information sources - either textual, temporal, geographic or community features - have been developed to achieve this task. Semantic information is often added at the end of the event detection to classify events into semantic topics. But semantic information can also be used to drive the actual event detection, which is less covered by academic research. We therefore supplemented an existing baseline event clustering algorithm with semantic information about the tweets in order to improve its performance. This paper lays out the details of the semantics-driven event clustering algorithms developed, discusses a novel method to aid in the creation of a ground truth for event detection purposes, and analyses how well the algorithms improve over baseline. We find that assigning semantic information to every individual tweet results in just a worse performance in F1 measure compared to baseline. If however semantics are assigned on a coarser, hashtag level the improvement over baseline is substantial and significant in both precision and recall
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