3,489 research outputs found
Reading the Source Code of Social Ties
Though online social network research has exploded during the past years, not
much thought has been given to the exploration of the nature of social links.
Online interactions have been interpreted as indicative of one social process
or another (e.g., status exchange or trust), often with little systematic
justification regarding the relation between observed data and theoretical
concept. Our research aims to breach this gap in computational social science
by proposing an unsupervised, parameter-free method to discover, with high
accuracy, the fundamental domains of interaction occurring in social networks.
By applying this method on two online datasets different by scope and type of
interaction (aNobii and Flickr) we observe the spontaneous emergence of three
domains of interaction representing the exchange of status, knowledge and
social support. By finding significant relations between the domains of
interaction and classic social network analysis issues (e.g., tie strength,
dyadic interaction over time) we show how the network of interactions induced
by the extracted domains can be used as a starting point for more nuanced
analysis of online social data that may one day incorporate the normative
grammar of social interaction. Our methods finds applications in online social
media services ranging from recommendation to visual link summarization.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web
(WebSci'14
Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future
Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with
companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications
for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation
is argument, many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover,
there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated
for agreement and disagreement, stance, sarcasm and argument quality. This
paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing bot, that selects arguments from
conversational corpora, and aims to use them appropriately in context. We
present an initial working prototype of Debbie, with some preliminary
evaluation and describe future work.Comment: IWSDS 201
F-formation Detection: Individuating Free-standing Conversational Groups in Images
Detection of groups of interacting people is a very interesting and useful
task in many modern technologies, with application fields spanning from
video-surveillance to social robotics. In this paper we first furnish a
rigorous definition of group considering the background of the social sciences:
this allows us to specify many kinds of group, so far neglected in the Computer
Vision literature. On top of this taxonomy, we present a detailed state of the
art on the group detection algorithms. Then, as a main contribution, we present
a brand new method for the automatic detection of groups in still images, which
is based on a graph-cuts framework for clustering individuals; in particular we
are able to codify in a computational sense the sociological definition of
F-formation, that is very useful to encode a group having only proxemic
information: position and orientation of people. We call the proposed method
Graph-Cuts for F-formation (GCFF). We show how GCFF definitely outperforms all
the state of the art methods in terms of different accuracy measures (some of
them are brand new), demonstrating also a strong robustness to noise and
versatility in recognizing groups of various cardinality.Comment: 32 pages, submitted to PLOS On
Extraction and Analysis of Dynamic Conversational Networks from TV Series
Identifying and characterizing the dynamics of modern tv series subplots is
an open problem. One way is to study the underlying social network of
interactions between the characters. Standard dynamic network extraction
methods rely on temporal integration, either over the whole considered period,
or as a sequence of several time-slices. However, they turn out to be
inappropriate in the case of tv series, because the scenes shown onscreen
alternatively focus on parallel storylines, and do not necessarily respect a
traditional chronology. In this article, we introduce Narrative Smoothing, a
novel network extraction method taking advantage of the plot properties to
solve some of their limitations. We apply our method to a corpus of 3 popular
series, and compare it to both standard approaches. Narrative smoothing leads
to more relevant observations when it comes to the characterization of the
protagonists and their relationships, confirming its appropriateness to model
the intertwined storylines constituting the plots.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1602.0781
The Visual Social Distancing Problem
One of the main and most effective measures to contain the recent viral
outbreak is the maintenance of the so-called Social Distancing (SD). To comply
with this constraint, workplaces, public institutions, transports and schools
will likely adopt restrictions over the minimum inter-personal distance between
people. Given this actual scenario, it is crucial to massively measure the
compliance to such physical constraint in our life, in order to figure out the
reasons of the possible breaks of such distance limitations, and understand if
this implies a possible threat given the scene context. All of this, complying
with privacy policies and making the measurement acceptable. To this end, we
introduce the Visual Social Distancing (VSD) problem, defined as the automatic
estimation of the inter-personal distance from an image, and the
characterization of the related people aggregations. VSD is pivotal for a
non-invasive analysis to whether people comply with the SD restriction, and to
provide statistics about the level of safety of specific areas whenever this
constraint is violated. We then discuss how VSD relates with previous
literature in Social Signal Processing and indicate which existing Computer
Vision methods can be used to manage such problem. We conclude with future
challenges related to the effectiveness of VSD systems, ethical implications
and future application scenarios.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. All the authors equally contributed to this
manuscript and they are listed by alphabetical order. Under submissio
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