19,541 research outputs found
Topicality and Social Impact: Diverse Messages but Focused Messengers
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high
influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter
hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as
#instantlyinlove? Questions like these demand a way to detect topics hidden
behind messages associated with an individual or a hashtag, and a gauge of
similarity among these topics. Here we develop such an approach to identify
clusters of similar hashtags by detecting communities in the hashtag
co-occurrence network. Then the topical diversity of a user's interests is
quantified by the entropy of her hashtags across different topic clusters. A
similar measure is applied to hashtags, based on co-occurring tags. We find
that high topical diversity of early adopters or co-occurring tags implies high
future popularity of hashtags. In contrast, low diversity helps an individual
accumulate social influence. In short, diverse messages and focused messengers
are more likely to gain impact.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
Overcoming data scarcity of Twitter: using tweets as bootstrap with application to autism-related topic content analysis
Notwithstanding recent work which has demonstrated the potential of using
Twitter messages for content-specific data mining and analysis, the depth of
such analysis is inherently limited by the scarcity of data imposed by the 140
character tweet limit. In this paper we describe a novel approach for targeted
knowledge exploration which uses tweet content analysis as a preliminary step.
This step is used to bootstrap more sophisticated data collection from directly
related but much richer content sources. In particular we demonstrate that
valuable information can be collected by following URLs included in tweets. We
automatically extract content from the corresponding web pages and treating
each web page as a document linked to the original tweet show how a temporal
topic model based on a hierarchical Dirichlet process can be used to track the
evolution of a complex topic structure of a Twitter community. Using
autism-related tweets we demonstrate that our method is capable of capturing a
much more meaningful picture of information exchange than user-chosen hashtags.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks
Analysis and Mining, 201
Detection of Trending Topic Communities: Bridging Content Creators and Distributors
The rise of a trending topic on Twitter or Facebook leads to the temporal
emergence of a set of users currently interested in that topic. Given the
temporary nature of the links between these users, being able to dynamically
identify communities of users related to this trending topic would allow for a
rapid spread of information. Indeed, individual users inside a community might
receive recommendations of content generated by the other users, or the
community as a whole could receive group recommendations, with new content
related to that trending topic. In this paper, we tackle this challenge, by
identifying coherent topic-dependent user groups, linking those who generate
the content (creators) and those who spread this content, e.g., by
retweeting/reposting it (distributors). This is a novel problem on
group-to-group interactions in the context of recommender systems. Analysis on
real-world Twitter data compare our proposal with a baseline approach that
considers the retweeting activity, and validate it with standard metrics.
Results show the effectiveness of our approach to identify communities
interested in a topic where each includes content creators and content
distributors, facilitating users' interactions and the spread of new
information.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, Hypertext 2017 conferenc
A Data-driven Study of Influences in Twitter Communities
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular
micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl
several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5
million user profiles, along with 420.2 million directed relations and 105
million tweets among the users. User influence scores are obtained from
influence measurement services, Klout and PeerIndex. Our analysis reveals
interesting findings, including non-power-law influence distribution, strong
reciprocity among users in a community, the existence of homophily and
hierarchical relationships in social influences. Most importantly, we observe
that whether a user retweets a message is strongly influenced by the first of
his followees who posted that message. To capture such an effect, we propose
the first influencer (FI) information diffusion model and show through
extensive evaluation that compared to the widely adopted independent cascade
model, the FI model is more stable and more accurate in predicting influence
spreads in Twitter communities.Comment: 11 page
A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users
On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of
users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions
in terms of network and content metrics.
Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their
characterisation still requires experimenting.
We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within
temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments
of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a
significant footprint on Twitter.
To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile
discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by
harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream.
The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics,
enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise
specific classes of online users.
The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its
empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns
in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online
activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is
publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore
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