Detection of Sociolinguistic Features in Digital Social Networks for the Detection of Communities

The emergence of digital social networks has transformed society, social groups, and institutions in terms of the communi cation and expression of their opinions. Determining how language variations allow the detection of communities, together with the relevance of specifc vocabulary (proposed by the National Council of Accreditation of Colombia (Consejo Nacional de Acreditación - CNA) to determine the quality evaluation parameters for universities in Colombia) in digital assemblages could lead to a better understanding of their dynamics and social foundations, thus resulting in better communication policies and intervention where necessary. The approach presented in this paper intends to determine what are the semantic spaces (sociolinguistic features) shared by social groups in digital social networks. It includes fve layers based on Design Science Research, which are integrated with Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP), Computational Linguistics (CL), and Artifcial Intelligence (AI). The approach is validated through a case study wherein the semantic values of a series of “Twit ter” institutional accounts belonging to Colombian Universities are analyzed in terms of the 12 quality factors established by CNA. In addition, the topics and the sociolect used by diferent actors in the university communities are also analyzed. The current approach allows determining the sociolinguistic features of social groups in digital social networks. Its application allows detecting the words or concepts to which each actor of a social group (university) gives more importance in terms of vocabular

AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics

Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. We address this issue by introducing Augur, a novel approach to the early detection of research topics. Augur analyses the diachronic relationships between research areas and is able to detect clusters of topics that exhibit dynamics correlated with the emergence of new research topics. Here we also present the Advanced Clique Percolation Method (ACPM), a new community detection algorithm developed specifically for supporting this task. Augur was evaluated on a gold standard of 1,408 debutant topics in the 2000-2011 interval and outperformed four alternative approaches in terms of both precision and recall

How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stake- holders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘parents’ of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise

An efficient and principled method for detecting communities in networks

A fundamental problem in the analysis of network data is the detection of network communities, groups of densely interconnected nodes, which may be overlapping or disjoint. Here we describe a method for finding overlapping communities based on a principled statistical approach using generative network models. We show how the method can be implemented using a fast, closed-form expectation-maximization algorithm that allows us to analyze networks of millions of nodes in reasonable running times. We test the method both on real-world networks and on synthetic benchmarks and find that it gives results competitive with previous methods. We also show that the same approach can be used to extract nonoverlapping community divisions via a relaxation method, and demonstrate that the algorithm is competitively fast and accurate for the nonoverlapping problem.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl