686 research outputs found
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Mapping networks of influence: tracking Twitter conversations through time and space
The increasing use of social media around global news events, such as the London Olympics in 2012, raises questions for international broadcasters about how to engage with users via social media in order to best achieve their individual missions. Twitter is a highly diverse social network whose conversations are multi-directional involving individual users, political and cultural actors, athletes and a range of media professionals. In so doing, users form networks of influence via their interactions affecting the ways that information is shared about specific global events.
This article attempts to understand how networks of influence are formed among Twitter users, and the relative influence of global news media organisations and information providers in the Twittersphere during such global news events. We build an analysis around a set of tweets collected during the 2012 London Olympics. To understand how different users influence the conversations across Twitter, we compare three types of accounts: those belonging to a number of well-known athletes, those belonging to some well-known commentators employed by the BBC, and a number of corporate accounts belonging to the BBC World Service and the official London Twitter account. We look at the data from two perspectives. First, to understand the structure of the social groupings formed among Twitter users, we use a network analysis to model social groupings in the Twittersphere across time and space. Second, to assess the influence of individual tweets, we investigate the ageing factor of tweets, which measures how long users continue to interact with a particular tweet after it is originally posted.
We consider what the profile of particular tweets from corporate and athletes’ accounts can tell us about how networks of influence are forged and maintained. We use these analyses to answer the questions: How do different types of accounts help shape the social networks? and, What determines the level and type of influence of a particular account
Influence, originality and similarity in directed acyclic graphs
We introduce a framework for network analysis based on random walks on
directed acyclic graphs where the probability of passing through a given node
is the key ingredient. We illustrate its use in evaluating the mutual influence
of nodes and discovering seminal papers in a citation network. We further
introduce a new similarity metric and test it in a simple personalized
recommendation process. This metric's performance is comparable to that of
classical similarity metrics, thus further supporting the validity of our
framework.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
We Could, but Should We? Ethical Considerations for Providing Access to GeoCities and Other Historical Digital Collections
We live in an era in which the ways that we can make sense of our past are evolving as more artifacts from that past become digital. At the same time, the responsibilities of traditional gatekeepers who have negotiated the ethics of historical data collection and use, such as librarians and archivists, are increasingly being sidelined by the system builders who decide whether and how to provide access to historical digital collections, often without sufficient reflection on the ethical issues at hand. It is our aim to better prepare system builders to grapple with these issues. This paper focuses discussions around one such digital collection from the dawn of the web, asking what sorts of analyses can and should be conducted on archival copies of the GeoCities web hosting platform that dates to 1994.This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the US National Science Foundation (grants 1618695 and 1704369), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Start Smart Labs, and Compute Canada
Multiscale mixing patterns in networks
Assortative mixing in networks is the tendency for nodes with the same
attributes, or metadata, to link to each other. It is a property often found in
social networks manifesting as a higher tendency of links occurring between
people with the same age, race, or political belief. Quantifying the level of
assortativity or disassortativity (the preference of linking to nodes with
different attributes) can shed light on the factors involved in the formation
of links and contagion processes in complex networks. It is common practice to
measure the level of assortativity according to the assortativity coefficient,
or modularity in the case of discrete-valued metadata. This global value is the
average level of assortativity across the network and may not be a
representative statistic when mixing patterns are heterogeneous. For example, a
social network spanning the globe may exhibit local differences in mixing
patterns as a consequence of differences in cultural norms. Here, we introduce
an approach to localise this global measure so that we can describe the
assortativity, across multiple scales, at the node level. Consequently we are
able to capture and qualitatively evaluate the distribution of mixing patterns
in the network. We find that for many real-world networks the distribution of
assortativity is skewed, overdispersed and multimodal. Our method provides a
clearer lens through which we can more closely examine mixing patterns in
networks.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
Using Incomplete Information for Complete Weight Annotation of Road Networks -- Extended Version
We are witnessing increasing interests in the effective use of road networks.
For example, to enable effective vehicle routing, weighted-graph models of
transportation networks are used, where the weight of an edge captures some
cost associated with traversing the edge, e.g., greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
or travel time. It is a precondition to using a graph model for routing that
all edges have weights. Weights that capture travel times and GHG emissions can
be extracted from GPS trajectory data collected from the network. However, GPS
trajectory data typically lack the coverage needed to assign weights to all
edges. This paper formulates and addresses the problem of annotating all edges
in a road network with travel cost based weights from a set of trips in the
network that cover only a small fraction of the edges, each with an associated
ground-truth travel cost. A general framework is proposed to solve the problem.
Specifically, the problem is modeled as a regression problem and solved by
minimizing a judiciously designed objective function that takes into account
the topology of the road network. In particular, the use of weighted PageRank
values of edges is explored for assigning appropriate weights to all edges, and
the property of directional adjacency of edges is also taken into account to
assign weights. Empirical studies with weights capturing travel time and GHG
emissions on two road networks (Skagen, Denmark, and North Jutland, Denmark)
offer insight into the design properties of the proposed techniques and offer
evidence that the techniques are effective.Comment: This is an extended version of "Using Incomplete Information for
Complete Weight Annotation of Road Networks," which is accepted for
publication in IEEE TKD
Mining of Textual Data from the Web for Speech Recognition
PrvotnĂm cĂlem tohoto projektu bylo prostudovat problematiku jazykovĂ©ho modelovánĂ pro rozpoznávánĂ Ĺ™eÄŤi a techniky pro zĂskávánĂ textovĂ˝ch dat z Webu. Text pĹ™edstavuje základnĂ techniky rozpoznávánĂ Ĺ™eÄŤi a detailnÄ›ji popisuje jazykovĂ© modely zaloĹľenĂ© na statistickĂ˝ch metodách. ZvláštÄ› se práce zabĂ˝vá kriterii pro vyhodnocenĂ kvality jazykovĂ˝ch modelĹŻ a systĂ©mĹŻ pro rozpoznávánĂ Ĺ™eÄŤi. Text dále popisuje modely a techniky dolovánĂ dat, zvláštÄ› vyhledávánĂ informacĂ. Dále jsou pĹ™edstaveny problĂ©my spojenĂ© se zĂskávánĂ dat z webu, a v kontrastu s tĂm je pĹ™edstaven vyhledávaÄŤ Google. SoučástĂ projektu byl návrh a implementace systĂ©mu pro zĂskávánĂ textu z webu, jehoĹľ detailnĂmu popisu je vÄ›nována náleĹľitá pozornost. NicmĂ©nÄ›, hlavnĂm cĂlem práce bylo ověřit, zda data zĂskaná z Webu mohou mĂt nÄ›jakĂ˝ pĹ™Ănos pro rozpoznávánĂ Ĺ™eÄŤi. PopsanĂ© techniky se tak snažà najĂt optimálnĂ zpĹŻsob, jak data zĂskaná z Webu pouĹľĂt pro zlepšenĂ ukázkovĂ˝ch jazykovĂ˝ch modelĹŻ, ale i modelĹŻ nasazenĂ˝ch v reálnĂ˝ch rozpoznávacĂch systĂ©mech.The preliminary goals of this project were to get familiar with language modeling for speech recognition and techniques for acquisition of text data from the Web. Speech recognition techniques are introduced and statistical language modeling is described in detail. The text also covers mining models and techniques, information retrieval especially. Specific problems of Web mining are discussed and Google search is introduced. Special attention was paid to detailed description of implementation of the text mining system. However, the main goal of this work was to determine, whether the data acquired from the Web can provide some improvement into the recognition systems. The text is describing experiments, which use the retrieved Web data to update sample language models.
Improving Search Engine Results by Query Extension and Categorization
Since its emergence, the Internet has changed the way in which information is distributed and it has strongly influenced how people communicate. Nowadays, Web search engines are widely used to locate information on the Web, and online social networks have become pervasive platforms of communication.
Retrieving relevant Web pages in response to a query is not an easy task for Web search engines due to the enormous corpus of data that the Web stores and the inherent ambiguity of search queries. We present two approaches to improve the effectiveness of Web search engines. The first approach allows us to retrieve more Web pages relevant to a user\u27s query by extending the query to include synonyms and other variations. The second, gives us the ability to retrieve Web pages that more precisely reflect the user\u27s intentions by filtering out those pages which are not related to the user-specified interests.
Discovering communities in online social networks (OSNs) has attracted much attention in recent years. We introduce the concept of subject-driven communities and propose to discover such communities by modeling a community using a posting/commenting interaction graph which is relevant to a given subject of interest, and then applying link analysis on the interaction graph to locate the core members of a community
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