Social Networks Influence Analysis

Pew Research Center estimates that as of 2014, 74% of the Internet Users used social media, i.e., more than 2.4 billion users. With the growing popularity of social media where Internet users exchange their opinions on many things including their daily life encounters, it is not surprising that many organizations are interested in learning what users say about their products and services. To be able to play a proactive role in steering what user’s say, many organizations have engaged in efforts aiming at identifying efficient ways of marketing certain products and services, and making sure user reviews are somewhat favorable. Favorable reviews are typically achieved through identifying users on social networks who have a strong influence power over a large number of other users, i.e. influential users. Twitter has emerged as one of the prominent social network services with 320 million monthly active users worldwide. Based on the literature, influential Twitter users have been typically analyzed using the following three models: topic-based model, topology-based model, and user characteristics-based model. The topology-based model is criticized for being static, i.e., it does not adapt to the social network changes such as user’s new posts, or new relationships. The user characteristics-based model was presented as an alternative approach; however, it was criticized for discounting the impact of interactions between users, and users’ interests. Lastly, the topic-based model, while sensitive to users’ interests, typically suffers from ignoring the inclusion of inter-user interactions. This thesis research introduces a dynamic, comprehensive and topic-sensitive approach for identifying social network influencers leveraging the strengths of the aforementioned models. Three separate experiments were conducted to evaluate the new approach using the information diffusion measure. In these experiments, software was developed to capture users’ tweets pertinent to a topic over a period of time, and store the tweet’s metadata in a relational database. A graph representing users was extracted from the database. The new approach was applied to the users’ graph to compute an influence score for each user. Results show that the new composite influence score is more accurate in comprehensively identifying true influential users, when compared to scores calculated using the characteristics-based, topic-based, and topology-based models. Also, this research shows that the new approach could leverage a variety of machine learning algorithms to accurately identify influencers. Last, while the focus of this research was on Twitter, our approach may be applicable to other social networks and micro-blogging services

From past to present: spam detection and identifying opinion leaders in social networks

On microblogging sites, which are gaining more and more users every day, a wide range of ideas are quickly emerging, spreading, and creating interactive environments. In some cases, in Turkey as well as in the rest of the world, it was noticed that events were published on microblogging sites before appearing in visual, audio and printed news sources. Thanks to the rapid flow of information in social networks, it can reach millions of people in seconds. In this context, social media can be seen as one of the most important sources of information affecting public opinion. Since the information in social networks became accessible, research started to be conducted using the information on the social networks. While the studies about spam detection and identification of opinion leaders gained popularity, surveys about these topics began to be published. This study also shows the importance of spam detection and identification of opinion leaders in social networks. It is seen that the data collected from social platforms, especially in recent years, has sourced many state-of-art applications. There are independent surveys that focus on filtering the spam content and detecting influencers on social networks. This survey analyzes both spam detection studies and opinion leader identification and categorizes these studies by their methodologies. As far as we know there is no survey that contains approaches for both spam detection and opinion leader identification in social networks. This survey contains an overview of the past and recent advances in both spam detection and opinion leader identification studies in social networks. Furthermore, readers of this survey have the opportunity of understanding general aspects of different studies about spam detection and opinion leader identification while observing key points and comparisons of these studies.This work is supported in part by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) through grant number 118E315 and grant number 120E187. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of TUBITAK.Publisher's VersionEmerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)Q4WOS:00080858480001

Measuring Social Influence in Online Social Networks - Focus on Human Behavior Analytics

With the advent of online social networks (OSN) and their ever-expanding reach, researchers seek to determine a social media user’s social influence (SI) proficiency. Despite its exploding application across multiple domains, the research confronts unprecedented practical challenges due to a lack of systematic examination of human behavior characteristics that impart social influence. This work aims to give a methodical overview by conducting a targeted literature analysis to appraise the accuracy and usefulness of past publications. The finding suggests that first, it is necessary to incorporate behavior analytics into statistical measurement models. Second, there is a severe imbalance between the abundance of theoretical research and the scarcity of empirical work to underpin the collective psychological theories to macro-level predictions. Thirdly, it is crucial to incorporate human sentiments and emotions into any measure of SI, particularly as OSN has endowed everyone with the intrinsic ability to influence others. The paper also suggests the merits of three primary research horizons for future considerations

Measuring Time-Sensitive and Topic-Specific Influence in Social Networks with LSTM and Self-Attention.

Influence measurement in social networks is vital to various real-world applications, such as online marketing and political campaigns. In this paper, we investigate the problem of measuring time-sensitive and topic-specific influence based on streaming texts and dynamic social networks. A user's influence can change rapidly in response to a new event and vary on different topics. For example, the political influence of Douglas Jones increased dramatically after winning the Alabama special election, and then rapidly decreased after the election week. During the same period, however, Douglas Jones' influence on sports remained low. Most existing approaches can only model the influence based on static social network structures and topic distributions. Furthermore, as popular social networking services embody many features to connect their users, multi-typed interactions make it hard to learn the roles that different interactions play when propagating information. To address these challenges, we propose a Time-sensitive and Topic-specific Influence Measurement (TTIM) method, to jointly model the streaming texts and dynamic social networks. We simulate the influence propagation process with a self-attention mechanism to learn the contributions of different interactions and track the influence dynamics with a matrix-adaptive long short-term memory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to measure time-sensitive and topic-specific influence. Furthermore, the TTIM model can be easily adapted to supporting online learning which consumes constant training time on newly arrived data for each timestamp. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed TTIM model on five datasets from Twitter and Reddit. The experimental results demonstrate promising performance compared to the state-of-the-art social influence analysis models and the potential of TTIM in visualizing influence dynamics and topic distribution

Leveraging social relevance : using social networks to enhance literature access and microblog search

L'objectif principal d'un système de recherche d'information est de sélectionner les documents pertinents qui répondent au besoin en information exprimé par l'utilisateur à travers une requête. Depuis les années 1970-1980, divers modèles théoriques ont été proposés dans ce sens pour représenter les documents et les requêtes d'une part et les apparier d'autre part, indépendamment de tout utilisateur. Plus récemment, l'arrivée du Web 2.0 ou le Web social a remis en cause l'efficacité de ces modèles du fait qu'ils ignorent l'environnement dans lequel l'information se situe. En effet, l'utilisateur n'est plus un simple consommateur de l'information mais il participe également à sa production. Pour accélérer la production de l'information et améliorer la qualité de son travail, l'utilisateur échange de l'information avec son voisinage social dont il partage les mêmes centres d'intérêt. Il préfère généralement obtenir l'information d'un contact direct plutôt qu'à partir d'une source anonyme. Ainsi, l'utilisateur, influencé par son environnement socio-cultuel, donne autant d'importance à la proximité sociale de la ressource d'information autant qu'à la similarité des documents à sa requête. Dans le but de répondre à ces nouvelles attentes, la recherche d'information s'oriente vers l'implication de l'utilisateur et de sa composante sociale dans le processus de la recherche. Ainsi, le nouvel enjeu de la recherche d'information est de modéliser la pertinence compte tenu de la position sociale et de l'influence de sa communauté. Le second enjeu est d'apprendre à produire un ordre de pertinence qui traduise le mieux possible l'importance et l'autorité sociale. C'est dans ce cadre précis, que s'inscrit notre travail. Notre objectif est d'estimer une pertinence sociale en intégrant d'une part les caractéristiques sociales des ressources et d'autre part les mesures de pertinence basées sur les principes de la recherche d'information classique. Nous proposons dans cette thèse d'intégrer le réseau social d'information dans le processus de recherche d'information afin d'utiliser les relations sociales entre les acteurs sociaux comme une source d'évidence pour mesurer la pertinence d'un document en réponse à une requête. Deux modèles de recherche d'information sociale ont été proposés à des cadres applicatifs différents : la recherche d'information bibliographique et la recherche d'information dans les microblogs. Les importantes contributions de chaque modèle sont détaillées dans la suite. Un modèle social pour la recherche d'information bibliographique. Nous avons proposé un modèle générique de la recherche d'information sociale, déployé particulièrement pour l'accès aux ressources bibliographiques. Ce modèle représente les publications scientifiques au sein d'réseau social et évalue leur importance selon la position des auteurs dans le réseau. Comparativement aux approches précédentes, ce modèle intègre des nouvelles entités sociales représentées par les annotateurs et les annotations sociales. En plus des liens de coauteur, ce modèle exploite deux autres types de relations sociales : la citation et l'annotation sociale. Enfin, nous proposons de pondérer ces relations en tenant compte de la position des auteurs dans le réseau social et de leurs mutuelles collaborations. Un modèle social pour la recherche d'information dans les microblogs.} Nous avons proposé un modèle pour la recherche de tweets qui évalue la qualité des tweets selon deux contextes: le contexte social et le contexte temporel. Considérant cela, la qualité d'un tweet est estimé par l'importance sociale du blogueur correspondant. L'importance du blogueur est calculée par l'application de l'algorithme PageRank sur le réseau d'influence sociale. Dans ce même objectif, la qualité d'un tweet est évaluée selon sa date de publication. Les tweets soumis dans les périodes d'activité d'un terme de la requête sont alors caractérisés par une plus grande importance. Enfin, nous proposons d'intégrer l'importance sociale du blogueur et la magnitude temporelle avec les autres facteurs de pertinence en utilisant un modèle Bayésien.An information retrieval system aims at selecting relevant documents that meet user's information needs expressed with a textual query. For the years 1970-1980, various theoretical models have been proposed in this direction to represent, on the one hand, documents and queries and on the other hand to match information needs independently of the user. More recently, the arrival of Web 2.0, known also as the social Web, has questioned the effectiveness of these models since they ignore the environment in which the information is located. In fact, the user is no longer a simple consumer of information but also involved in its production. To accelerate the production of information and improve the quality of their work, users tend to exchange documents with their social neighborhood that shares the same interests. It is commonly preferred to obtain information from a direct contact rather than from an anonymous source. Thus, the user, under the influenced of his social environment, gives as much importance to the social prominence of the information as the textual similarity of documents at the query. In order to meet these new prospects, information retrieval is moving towards novel user centric approaches that take into account the social context within the retrieval process. Thus, the new challenge of an information retrieval system is to model the relevance with regards to the social position and the influence of individuals in their community. The second challenge is produce an accurate ranking of relevance that reflects as closely as possible the importance and the social authority of information producers. It is in this specific context that fits our work. Our goal is to estimate the social relevance of documents by integrating the social characteristics of resources as well as relevance metrics as defined in classical information retrieval field. We propose in this work to integrate the social information network in the retrieval process and exploit the social relations between social actors as a source of evidence to measure the relevance of a document in response to a query. Two social information retrieval models have been proposed in different application frameworks: literature access and microblog retrieval. The main contributions of each model are detailed in the following. A social information model for flexible literature access. We proposed a generic social information retrieval model for literature access. This model represents scientific papers within a social network and evaluates their importance according to the position of respective authors in the network. Compared to previous approaches, this model incorporates new social entities represented by annotators and social annotations (tags). In addition to co-authorships, this model includes two other types of social relationships: citation and social annotation. Finally, we propose to weight these relationships according to the position of authors in the social network and their mutual collaborations. A social model for information retrieval for microblog search. We proposed a microblog retrieval model that evaluates the quality of tweets in two contexts: the social context and temporal context. The quality of a tweet is estimated by the social importance of the corresponding blogger. In particular, blogger's importance is calculated by the applying PageRank algorithm on the network of social influence. With the same aim, the quality of a tweet is evaluated according to its date of publication. Tweets submitted in periods of activity of query terms are then characterized by a greater importance. Finally, we propose to integrate the social importance of blogger and the temporal magnitude tweets as well as other relevance factors using a Bayesian network model

How to measure influence in social networks?

Today, social networks are a valued resource of social data that can be used to understand the interactions among people and communities. People can influence or be influenced by interactions, shared opinions and emotions. How-ever, in the social network analysis, one of the main problems is to find the most influential people. This work aims to report on the results of literature review whose goal was to identify and analyse the metrics, algorithms and models used to measure the user influence on social networks. The search was carried out in three databases: Scopus, IEEEXplore, and ScienceDirect. We restricted pub-lished articles between the years 2014 until 2020, in English, and we used the following keywords: social networks analysis, influence, metrics, measurements, and algorithms. Backward process was applied to complement the search consid-ering inclusion and exclusion criteria. As a result of this process, we obtained 25 articles: 12 in the initial search and 13 in the backward process. The literature review resulted in the collection of 21 influence metrics, 4 influence algorithms, and 8 models of influence analysis. We start by defining influence and presenting its properties and applications. We then proceed by describing, analysing and categorizing all that were found metrics, algorithms, and models to measure in-fluence in social networks. Finally, we present a discussion on these metrics, al-gorithms, and models. This work helps researchers to quickly gain a broad per-spective on metrics, algorithms, and models for influence in social networks and their relative potentialities and limitations.This work has been supported by IViSSEM: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-28284, COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020