Social influence analysis in microblogging platforms - a topic-sensitive based approach

The use of Social Media, particularly microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has proven to be an effective channel for promoting ideas to online audiences. In a world where information can bias public opinion it is essential to analyse the propagation and influence of information in large-scale networks. Recent research studying social media data to rank users by topical relevance have largely focused on the “retweet", “following" and “mention" relations. In this paper we propose the use of semantic profiles for deriving influential users based on the retweet subgraph of the Twitter graph. We introduce a variation of the PageRank algorithm for analysing users’ topical and entity influence based on the topical/entity relevance of a retweet relation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related algorithms including HITS, InDegree and Topic-Sensitive PageRank. We also introduce VisInfluence, a visualisation platform for presenting top influential users based on a topical query need

Aggregating Content and Network Information to Curate Twitter User Lists

Twitter introduced user lists in late 2009, allowing users to be grouped according to meaningful topics or themes. Lists have since been adopted by media outlets as a means of organising content around news stories. Thus the curation of these lists is important - they should contain the key information gatekeepers and present a balanced perspective on a story. Here we address this list curation process from a recommender systems perspective. We propose a variety of criteria for generating user list recommendations, based on content analysis, network analysis, and the "crowdsourcing" of existing user lists. We demonstrate that these types of criteria are often only successful for datasets with certain characteristics. To resolve this issue, we propose the aggregation of these different "views" of a news story on Twitter to produce more accurate user recommendations to support the curation process

Event detection, tracking, and visualization in Twitter: a mention-anomaly-based approach

The ever-growing number of people using Twitter makes it a valuable source of timely information. However, detecting events in Twitter is a difficult task, because tweets that report interesting events are overwhelmed by a large volume of tweets on unrelated topics. Existing methods focus on the textual content of tweets and ignore the social aspect of Twitter. In this paper we propose MABED (i.e. mention-anomaly-based event detection), a novel statistical method that relies solely on tweets and leverages the creation frequency of dynamic links (i.e. mentions) that users insert in tweets to detect significant events and estimate the magnitude of their impact over the crowd. MABED also differs from the literature in that it dynamically estimates the period of time during which each event is discussed, rather than assuming a predefined fixed duration for all events. The experiments we conducted on both English and French Twitter data show that the mention-anomaly-based approach leads to more accurate event detection and improved robustness in presence of noisy Twitter content. Qualitatively speaking, we find that MABED helps with the interpretation of detected events by providing clear textual descriptions and precise temporal descriptions. We also show how MABED can help understanding users' interest. Furthermore, we describe three visualizations designed to favor an efficient exploration of the detected events.Comment: 17 page