2,329 research outputs found
Clustering Memes in Social Media
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to
study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their
massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between
different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns
versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal
definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to
person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised
learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication.
The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from
existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for
the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of
social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content,
metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of
pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is
carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis
shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the
best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that
a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as
effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully
automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in
streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances
in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201
Cluster-based Deep Ensemble Learning for Emotion Classification in Internet Memes
Memes have gained popularity as a means to share visual ideas through the
Internet and social media by mixing text, images and videos, often for humorous
purposes. Research enabling automated analysis of memes has gained attention in
recent years, including among others the task of classifying the emotion
expressed in memes. In this paper, we propose a novel model, cluster-based deep
ensemble learning (CDEL), for emotion classification in memes. CDEL is a hybrid
model that leverages the benefits of a deep learning model in combination with
a clustering algorithm, which enhances the model with additional information
after clustering memes with similar facial features. We evaluate the
performance of CDEL on a benchmark dataset for emotion classification, proving
its effectiveness by outperforming a wide range of baseline models and
achieving state-of-the-art performance. Further evaluation through ablated
models demonstrates the effectiveness of the different components of CDEL
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
Competition and Success in the Meme Pool: a Case Study on Quickmeme.com
The advent of social media has provided data and insights about how people
relate to information and culture. While information is composed by bits and
its fundamental building bricks are relatively well understood, the same cannot
be said for culture. The fundamental cultural unit has been defined as a
"meme". Memes are defined in literature as specific fundamental cultural
traits, that are floating in their environment together. Just like genes
carried by bodies, memes are carried by cultural manifestations like songs,
buildings or pictures. Memes are studied in their competition for being
successfully passed from one generation of minds to another, in different ways.
In this paper we choose an empirical approach to the study of memes. We
downloaded data about memes from a well-known website hosting hundreds of
different memes and thousands of their implementations. From this data, we
empirically describe the behavior of these memes. We statistically describe
meme occurrences in our dataset and we delineate their fundamental traits,
along with those traits that make them more or less apt to be successful
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
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