2 research outputs found
A Motif-based Approach for Identifying Controversy
Among the topics discussed in Social Media, some lead to controversy. A
number of recent studies have focused on the problem of identifying controversy
in social media mostly based on the analysis of textual content or rely on
global network structure. Such approaches have strong limitations due to the
difficulty of understanding natural language, and of investigating the global
network structure. In this work we show that it is possible to detect
controversy in social media by exploiting network motifs, i.e., local patterns
of user interaction. The proposed approach allows for a language-independent
and fine- grained and efficient-to-compute analysis of user discussions and
their evolution over time. The supervised model exploiting motif patterns can
achieve 85% accuracy, with an improvement of 7% compared to baseline
structural, propagation-based and temporal network features
Polarized User and Topic Tracking in Twitter
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to understand and monitor collective behaviours. In this work, we focus on polarisation classes, i.e., those topics that require the user to side exclusively with one position. The proposed method provides an iterative classification of users and keywords: first, polarised users are identified, then polarised keywords are discovered by monitoring the activities of previously classified users. This method thus allows tracking users and topics over time. We report several experiments conducted on two Twitter datasets during political election time-frames. We measure the user classification accuracy on a golden set of users, and analyse the relevance of the extracted keywords for the ongoing political discussion