Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends

Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and 'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology

Interactive Search and Exploration in Online Discussion Forums Using Multimodal Embeddings

In this paper we present a novel interactive multimodal learning system, which facilitates search and exploration in large networks of social multimedia users. It allows the analyst to identify and select users of interest, and to find similar users in an interactive learning setting. Our approach is based on novel multimodal representations of users, words and concepts, which we simultaneously learn by deploying a general-purpose neural embedding model. We show these representations to be useful not only for categorizing users, but also for automatically generating user and community profiles. Inspired by traditional summarization approaches, we create the profiles by selecting diverse and representative content from all available modalities, i.e. the text, image and user modality. The usefulness of the approach is evaluated using artificial actors, which simulate user behavior in a relevance feedback scenario. Multiple experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the quality of our multimodal representations, to compare different embedding strategies, and to determine the importance of different modalities. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach on two different multimedia collections originating from the violent online extremism forum Stormfront and the microblogging platform Twitter, which are particularly interesting due to the high semantic level of the discussions they feature

Social Media for Cities, Counties and Communities

Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other tools and services with user- generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Some government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens, especially during crises and emergencies. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Potential exists to rapidly identify issues of concern for emergency management by detecting meaningful patterns or trends in the stream of messages and information flow. Similarly, monitoring these patterns and themes over time could provide officials with insights into the perceptions and mood of the community that cannot be collected through traditional methods (e.g., phone or mail surveys) due to their substantive costs, especially in light of reduced and shrinking budgets of governments at all levels. We conducted a pilot study in 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and to a lesser extent representatives of groups from Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia) with a view to contributing to a general understanding of the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We were especially interested in gaining greater insight into social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly routine crises, such as traffic or weather disruptions)

Giving meaning to tweets in emergency situations: a semantic approach for filtering and visualizing social data

In this paper, we propose a semantic approach for monitoring information publishedon social networks about a specific event. In the era of Big Data, when an emergencyoccurs information posted on social networks becomes more and more helpful foremergency operators. As direct witnesses of the situation, people share photos, videosor text messages about events that call their attention. In the emergency operationcenter, these data can be collected and integrated within the management processto improve the overall understanding of the situation and in particular of the citizenreactions. To support the tracking and analyzing of social network activities, there arealready monitoring tools that combine visualization techniques with geographicalmaps. However, tweets are written from the perspective of citizens and the informationthey provide might be inaccurate, irrelevant or false. Our approach tries to dealwith data relevance proposing an innovative ontology-based method for filteringtweets and extracting meaningful topics depending on their semantic content. In thisway data become relevant for the operators to make decisions. Two real cases used totest its applicability showed that different visualization techniques might be neededto support situation awareness. This ontology-based approach can be generalizedfor analyzing the information flow about other domains of application changing theunderlying knowledge base.This work is supported by the project emerCien grant funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2012-09687)

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis in marketing communications: a science mapping analysis in Web of Science (1998–2018)

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis has become ubiquitous in our society, with applications in online searching, computer vision, image understanding, artificial intelligence and marketing communications (MarCom). Within this context, opinion mining and sentiment analysis in marketing communications (OMSAMC) has a strong role in the development of the field by allowing us to understand whether people are satisfied or dissatisfied with our service or product in order to subsequently analyze the strengths and weaknesses of those consumer experiences. To the best of our knowledge, there is no science mapping analysis covering the research about opinion mining and sentiment analysis in the MarCom ecosystem. In this study, we perform a science mapping analysis on the OMSAMC research, in order to provide an overview of the scientific work during the last two decades in this interdisciplinary area and to show trends that could be the basis for future developments in the field. This study was carried out using VOSviewer, CitNetExplorer and InCites based on results from Web of Science (WoS). The results of this analysis show the evolution of the field, by highlighting the most notable authors, institutions, keywords, publications, countries, categories and journals.The research was funded by Programa Operativo FEDER Andalucía 2014‐2020, grant number “La reputación de las organizaciones en una sociedad digital. Elaboración de una Plataforma Inteligente para la Localización, Identificación y Clasificación de Influenciadores en los Medios Sociales Digitales (UMA18‐ FEDERJA‐148)” and The APC was funded by the same research gran

Mining Social Media to Understand Consumers' Health Concerns and the Public's Opinion on Controversial Health Topics.

Social media websites are increasingly used by the general public as a venue to express health concerns and discuss controversial medical and public health issues. This information could be utilized for the purposes of public health surveillance as well as solicitation of public opinions. In this thesis, I developed methods to extract health-related information from multiple sources of social media data, and conducted studies to generate insights from the extracted information using text-mining techniques. To understand the availability and characteristics of health-related information in social media, I first identified the users who seek health information online and participate in online health community, and analyzed their motivations and behavior by two case studies of user-created groups on MedHelp and a diabetes online community on Twitter. Through a review of tweets mentioning eye-related medical concepts identified by MetaMap, I diagnosed the common reasons of tweets mislabeled by natural language processing tools tuned for biomedical texts, and trained a classifier to exclude non medically-relevant tweets to increase the precision of the extracted data. Furthermore, I conducted two studies to evaluate the effectiveness of understanding public opinions on controversial medical and public health issues from social media information using text-mining techniques. The first study applied topic modeling and text summarization to automatically distill users' key concerns about the purported link between autism and vaccines. The outputs of two methods cover most of the public concerns of MMR vaccines reported in previous survey studies. In the second study, I estimated the public's view on the ac{ACA} by applying sentiment analysis to four years of Twitter data, and demonstrated that the the rates of positive/negative responses measured by tweet sentiment are in general agreement with the results of Kaiser Family Foundation Poll. Finally, I designed and implemented a system which can automatically collect and analyze online news comments to help researchers, public health workers, and policy makers to better monitor and understand the public's opinion on issues such as controversial health-related topics.PhDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120714/1/owenliu_1.pd