2,328 research outputs found

    Association and Temporality between News and Tweets

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    With the advent of social media, the boundaries of mainstream journalism and social networks are becoming blurred. User-generated content is increasing, and hence, journalists dedicate considerable time searching platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to announce, spread, and monitor news and crowd check information. Many studies have looked at social networks as news sources, but the relationship and interconnections between this type of platform and news media have not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we have studied a series of news articles and examined a set of related comments on a social network during a period of six months. Specifically, a sample of articles from generalist Portuguese news sources published in the first semester of 2016 was clustered, and the resulting clusters were then associated with tweets of Portuguese users with the recourse to a similarity measure. Focusing on a subset of clusters, we have performed a temporal analysis by examining the evolution of the two types of documents (articles and tweets) and the timing of when they appeared. It appears that for some stories, namely Brexit and the European Football Cup, the publishing of news articles intensifies on key dates (event-oriented), while the discussion on social media is more balanced throughout the months leading up to those events.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Detecting and Explaining Causes From Text For a Time Series Event

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    Explaining underlying causes or effects about events is a challenging but valuable task. We define a novel problem of generating explanations of a time series event by (1) searching cause and effect relationships of the time series with textual data and (2) constructing a connecting chain between them to generate an explanation. To detect causal features from text, we propose a novel method based on the Granger causality of time series between features extracted from text such as N-grams, topics, sentiments, and their composition. The generation of the sequence of causal entities requires a commonsense causative knowledge base with efficient reasoning. To ensure good interpretability and appropriate lexical usage we combine symbolic and neural representations, using a neural reasoning algorithm trained on commonsense causal tuples to predict the next cause step. Our quantitative and human analysis show empirical evidence that our method successfully extracts meaningful causality relationships between time series with textual features and generates appropriate explanation between them.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201

    Temporal word embeddings for dynamic user profiling in Twitter

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    The research described in this paper focused on exploring the domain of user profiling, a nascent and contentious technology which has been steadily attracting increased interest from the research community as its potential for providing personalised digital services is realised. An extensive review of related literature revealed that limited research has been conducted into how temporal aspects of users can be captured using user profiling techniques. This, coupled with the notable lack of research into the use of word embedding techniques to capture temporal variances in language, revealed an opportunity to extend the Random Indexing word embedding technique such that the interests of users could be modelled based on their use of language. To achieve this, this work concerned itself with extending an existing implementation of Temporal Random Indexing to model Twitter users across multiple granularities of time based on their use of language. The product of this is a novel technique for temporal user profiling, where a set of vectors is used to describe the evolution of a Twitter user’s interests over time through their use of language. The vectors produced were evaluated against a temporal implementation of another state-of-the-art word embedding technique, the Word2Vec Dynamic Independent Skip-gram model, where it was found that Temporal Random Indexing outperformed Word2Vec in the generation of temporal user profiles

    Retweeting my feelings? Exploring the temporal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media use

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    Social media platform (SMP) use has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. New user groups are utilising SMPs more frequently to satisfy their unmet psychological needs. However, research to date has insufficiently explored variations in SMP use due to the pandemic. As the pandemic has adversely impacted the general public’s mental health, we propose and then apply the Temporal-Needs-Affordances-Features (T-NAF) model in this context. Public engagement with two international mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter were tracked over four years. Results show that the pandemic initially coincided with a significant increase in engagement (e.g., retweets) and a significant decrease in network size (e.g., followers). This establishes that a larger proportion of individuals engaged with resharing behaviour as the pandemic commenced, reinforcing the importance of SMPs in relation to mental health and needs satisfaction. This study also highlights the importance of temporality in social media research. Future research pathways are discussed

    Modeling Temporal Evidence from External Collections

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    Newsworthy events are broadcast through multiple mediums and prompt the crowds to produce comments on social media. In this paper, we propose to leverage on this behavioral dynamics to estimate the most relevant time periods for an event (i.e., query). Recent advances have shown how to improve the estimation of the temporal relevance of such topics. In this approach, we build on two major novelties. First, we mine temporal evidences from hundreds of external sources into topic-based external collections to improve the robustness of the detection of relevant time periods. Second, we propose a formal retrieval model that generalizes the use of the temporal dimension across different aspects of the retrieval process. In particular, we show that temporal evidence of external collections can be used to (i) infer a topic's temporal relevance, (ii) select the query expansion terms, and (iii) re-rank the final results for improved precision. Experiments with TREC Microblog collections show that the proposed time-aware retrieval model makes an effective and extensive use of the temporal dimension to improve search results over the most recent temporal models. Interestingly, we observe a strong correlation between precision and the temporal distribution of retrieved and relevant documents.Comment: To appear in WSDM 201
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