Crime pattern detection using online social media

In this research, we show online social networks can be used to study crime detection problems. Crime is defined as an act harmful not only to the individual involved, but also to the community as a whole. It is also a forbidden act that is punishable by law. Crimes are social nuisances that place heavy financial burdens on society. Here we look at use of data mining followed by sentiment analysis on online social networks, to help detect the crime patterns. Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to post brief text updates, also referred to as tweets . These updates can convey important information about the author. A filter was designed to extract tweets from cities deemed to be either the most dangerous or the safest in the United States (US). A geographic analysis revealed a correlation between these tweets and the crimes that occurred in the corresponding cities. Over 100,000 crime-related tweets were collected over a period of 20 days. Sentiment analysis techniques were conducted on these tweets to analyze the crime intensity of a particular location. This type of study will help reveal the crime rate of a location in real-time. Although the results of this test helped in detecting crime patterns, the sentiment analysis techniques did not always guarantee the proper results. We conclude with applications of this type of study and how it can be improved by applying media to text processing techniques --Abstract, page iii

Models of Social Groups in Blogosphere Based on Information about Comment Addressees and Sentiments

This work concerns the analysis of number, sizes and other characteristics of groups identified in the blogosphere using a set of models identifying social relations. These models differ regarding identification of social relations, influenced by methods of classifying the addressee of the comments (they are either the post author or the author of a comment on which this comment is directly addressing) and by a sentiment calculated for comments considering the statistics of words present and connotation. The state of a selected blog portal was analyzed in sequential, partly overlapping time intervals. Groups in each interval were identified using a version of the CPM algorithm, on the basis of them, stable groups, existing for at least a minimal assumed duration of time, were identified.Comment: Gliwa B., Ko\'zlak J., Zygmunt A., Models of Social Groups in Blogosphere Based on Information about Comment Addressees and Sentiments, in the K. Aberer et al. (Eds.): SocInfo 2012, LNCS 7710, pp. 475-488, Best Paper Awar

Connecting Dream Networks Across Cultures

Many species dream, yet there remain many open research questions in the study of dreams. The symbolism of dreams and their interpretation is present in cultures throughout history. Analysis of online data sources for dream interpretation using network science leads to understanding symbolism in dreams and their associated meaning. In this study, we introduce dream interpretation networks for English, Chinese and Arabic that represent different cultures from various parts of the world. We analyze communities in these networks, finding that symbols within a community are semantically related. The central nodes in communities give insight about cultures and symbols in dreams. The community structure of different networks highlights cultural similarities and differences. Interconnections between different networks are also identified by translating symbols from different languages into English. Structural correlations across networks point out relationships between cultures. Similarities between network communities are also investigated by analysis of sentiment in symbol interpretations. We find that interpretations within a community tend to have similar sentiment. Furthermore, we cluster communities based on their sentiment, yielding three main categories of positive, negative, and neutral dream symbols.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

#Brexit: Leave or Remain? The Role of User's Community and Diachronic Evolution on Stance Detection

[EN] Interest has grown around the classification of stance that users assume within online debates in recent years. Stance has been usually addressed by considering users posts in isolation, while social studies highlight that social communities may contribute to influence users¿ opinion. Furthermore, stance should be studied in a diachronic perspective, since it could help to shed light on users¿ opinion shift dynamics that can be recorded during the debate. We analyzed the political discussion in UK about the BREXIT referendum on Twitter, proposing a novel approach and annotation schema for stance detection, with the main aim of investigating the role of features related to social network community and diachronic stance evolution. Classification experiments show that such features provide very useful clues for detecting stance.The work of P. Rosso was partially funded by the Spanish MICINN under the research projects MISMIS-FAKEnHATE on Misinformation and Miscommunication in social media: FAKE news and HATE speech(PGC2018-096212-B-C31) and PROMETEO/2019/121 (DeepPattern) of the Generalitat Valenciana. The work of V. Patti and G. Ruffo was partially funded by Progetto di Ateneo/CSP 2016 Immigrants, Hate and Prejudice in Social Media (S1618 L2 BOSC 01).Lai, M.; Patti, V.; Ruffo, G.; Rosso, P. (2020). #Brexit: Leave or Remain? The Role of User's Community and Diachronic Evolution on Stance Detection. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems. 39(2):2341-2352. https://doi.org/10.3233/JIFS-179895S23412352392Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J.-L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2008(10), P10008. doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/p10008Deitrick, W., & Hu, W. (2013). Mutually Enhancing Community Detection and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Networks. Journal of Data Analysis and Information Processing, 01(03), 19-29. doi:10.4236/jdaip.2013.13004Duranti A. and Goodwin C. , Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, Cambridge University Press, (1992).Evans A. , Stance and identity in Twitter hashtags, Language@ Internet 13(1) (2016).Fortunato, S. (2010). Community detection in graphs. Physics Reports, 486(3-5), 75-174. doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2009.11.002Gelman, A., & King, G. (1993). Why Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls So Variable When Votes Are So Predictable? British Journal of Political Science, 23(4), 409-451. doi:10.1017/s0007123400006682Gonçalves, B., Perra, N., & Vespignani, A. (2011). Modeling Users’ Activity on Twitter Networks: Validation of Dunbar’s Number. PLoS ONE, 6(8), e22656. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022656González, M. C., Hidalgo, C. A., & Barabási, A.-L. (2008). Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature, 453(7196), 779-782. doi:10.1038/nature06958Hernández-Castañeda, Á., Calvo, H., & Gambino, O. J. (2018). Impact of polarity in deception detection. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 35(1), 549-558. doi:10.3233/jifs-169610Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabási, A.-L., Brewer, D., … Van Alstyne, M. (2009). Computational Social Science. Science, 323(5915), 721-723. doi:10.1126/science.1167742Mohammad, S. M., Sobhani, P., & Kiritchenko, S. (2017). Stance and Sentiment in Tweets. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 17(3), 1-23. doi:10.1145/3003433Mohammad, S. M., & Turney, P. D. (2012). CROWDSOURCING A WORD-EMOTION ASSOCIATION LEXICON. Computational Intelligence, 29(3), 436-465. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8640.2012.00460.xPang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval, 2(1–2), 1-135. doi:10.1561/1500000011Pennebaker J.W. , Francis M.E. and Booth R.J. , Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC 2001, Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 71 (2001).Sulis, E., Irazú Hernández Farías, D., Rosso, P., Patti, V., & Ruffo, G. (2016). Figurative messages and affect in Twitter: Differences between #irony, #sarcasm and #not. Knowledge-Based Systems, 108, 132-143. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2016.05.035Theocharis, Y., & Lowe, W. (2015). Does Facebook increase political participation? Evidence from a field experiment. Information, Communication & Society, 19(10), 1465-1486. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1119871Whissell, C. (2009). Using the Revised Dictionary of Affect in Language to Quantify the Emotional Undertones of Samples of Natural Language. Psychological Reports, 105(2), 509-521. doi:10.2466/pr0.105.2.509-52

SUPER: Towards the Use of Social Sensors for Security Assessments and Proactive Management of Emergencies

Social media statistics during recent disasters (e.g. the 20 million tweets relating to 'Sandy' storm and the sharing of related photos in Instagram at a rate of 10/sec) suggest that the understanding and management of real-world events by civil protection and law enforcement agencies could benefit from the effective blending of social media information into their resilience processes. In this paper, we argue that despite the widespread use of social media in various domains (e.g. marketing/branding/finance), there is still no easy, standardized and effective way to leverage different social media streams -- also referred to as social sensors -- in security/emergency management applications. We also describe the EU FP7 project SUPER (Social sensors for secUrity assessments and Proactive EmeRgencies management), started in 2014, which aims to tackle this technology gap

Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations