2,226 research outputs found
A Bayesian-Based Approach for Public Sentiment Modeling
Public sentiment is a direct public-centric indicator for the success of
effective action planning. Despite its importance, systematic modeling of
public sentiment remains untapped in previous studies. This research aims to
develop a Bayesian-based approach for quantitative public sentiment modeling,
which is capable of incorporating uncertainty and guiding the selection of
public sentiment measures. This study comprises three steps: (1) quantifying
prior sentiment information and new sentiment observations with Dirichlet
distribution and multinomial distribution respectively; (2) deriving the
posterior distribution of sentiment probabilities through incorporating the
Dirichlet distribution and multinomial distribution via Bayesian inference; and
(3) measuring public sentiment through aggregating sampled sets of sentiment
probabilities with an application-based measure. A case study on Hurricane
Harvey is provided to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the
proposed approach. The developed approach also has the potential to be
generalized to model various types of probability-based measures
Using Robust PCA to estimate regional characteristics of language use from geo-tagged Twitter messages
Principal component analysis (PCA) and related techniques have been
successfully employed in natural language processing. Text mining applications
in the age of the online social media (OSM) face new challenges due to
properties specific to these use cases (e.g. spelling issues specific to texts
posted by users, the presence of spammers and bots, service announcements,
etc.). In this paper, we employ a Robust PCA technique to separate typical
outliers and highly localized topics from the low-dimensional structure present
in language use in online social networks. Our focus is on identifying
geospatial features among the messages posted by the users of the Twitter
microblogging service. Using a dataset which consists of over 200 million
geolocated tweets collected over the course of a year, we investigate whether
the information present in word usage frequencies can be used to identify
regional features of language use and topics of interest. Using the PCA pursuit
method, we are able to identify important low-dimensional features, which
constitute smoothly varying functions of the geographic location
Learning and Forecasting Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks
Social media and social networking sites have become a global pinboard for
exposition and discussion of news, topics, and ideas, where social media users
often update their opinions about a particular topic by learning from the
opinions shared by their friends. In this context, can we learn a data-driven
model of opinion dynamics that is able to accurately forecast opinions from
users? In this paper, we introduce SLANT, a probabilistic modeling framework of
opinion dynamics, which represents users opinions over time by means of marked
jump diffusion stochastic differential equations, and allows for efficient
model simulation and parameter estimation from historical fine grained event
data. We then leverage our framework to derive a set of efficient predictive
formulas for opinion forecasting and identify conditions under which opinions
converge to a steady state. Experiments on data gathered from Twitter show that
our model provides a good fit to the data and our formulas achieve more
accurate forecasting than alternatives
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