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Distinguishing Topical and Social Groups Based on Common Identity and Bond Theory
Social groups play a crucial role in social media platforms because they form
the basis for user participation and engagement. Groups are created explicitly
by members of the community, but also form organically as members interact. Due
to their importance, they have been studied widely (e.g., community detection,
evolution, activity, etc.). One of the key questions for understanding how such
groups evolve is whether there are different types of groups and how they
differ. In Sociology, theories have been proposed to help explain how such
groups form. In particular, the common identity and common bond theory states
that people join groups based on identity (i.e., interest in the topics
discussed) or bond attachment (i.e., social relationships). The theory has been
applied qualitatively to small groups to classify them as either topical or
social. We use the identity and bond theory to define a set of features to
classify groups into those two categories. Using a dataset from Flickr, we
extract user-defined groups and automatically-detected groups, obtained from a
community detection algorithm. We discuss the process of manual labeling of
groups into social or topical and present results of predicting the group label
based on the defined features. We directly validate the predictions of the
theory showing that the metrics are able to forecast the group type with high
accuracy. In addition, we present a comparison between declared and detected
groups along topicality and sociality dimensions.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
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