On the Promotion of the Social Web Intelligence

Given the ever-growing information generated through various online social outlets, analytical research on social media has intensified in the past few years from all walks of life. In particular, works on social Web intelligence foster and benefit from the wisdom of the crowds and attempt to derive actionable information from such data. In the form of collective intelligence, crowds gather together and contribute to solving problems that may be difficult or impossible to solve by individuals and single computers. In addition, the consumer insight revealed from social footprints can be leveraged to build powerful business intelligence tools, enabling efficient and effective decision-making processes. This dissertation is broadly concerned with the intelligence that can emerge from the social Web platforms. In particular, the two phenomena of social privacy and online persuasion are identified as the two pillars of the social Web intelligence, studying which is essential in the promotion and advancement of both collective and business intelligence. The first part of the dissertation is focused on the phenomenon of social privacy. This work is mainly motivated by the privacy dichotomy problem. Users often face difficulties specifying privacy policies that are consistent with their actual privacy concerns and attitudes. As such, before making use of social data, it is imperative to employ multiple safeguards beyond the current privacy settings of users. As a possible solution, we utilize user social footprints to detect their privacy preferences automatically. An unsupervised collaborative filtering approach is proposed to characterize the attributes of publicly available accounts that are intended to be private. Unlike the majority of earlier studies, a variety of social data types is taken into account, including the social context, the published content, as well as the profile attributes of users. Our approach can provide support in making an informed decision whether to exploit one\u27s publicly available data to draw intelligence. With the aim of gaining insight into the strategies behind online persuasion, the second part of the dissertation studies written comments in online deliberations. Specifically, we explore different dimensions of the language, the temporal aspects of the communication, as well as the attributes of the participating users to understand what makes people change their beliefs. In addition, we investigate the factors that are perceived to be the reasons behind persuasion by the users. We link our findings to traditional persuasion research, hoping to uncover when and how they apply to online persuasion. A set of rhetorical relations is known to be of importance in persuasive discourse. We further study the automatic identification and disambiguation of such rhetorical relations, aiming to take a step closer towards automatic analysis of online persuasion. Finally, a small proof of concept tool is presented, showing the value of our persuasion and rhetoric studies

In Search of a Lost Effect: Generality of Discrepancy Effects in Memory Paradigms

The current project investigated the generality of discrepancy effect in retrospective memory (RM) reported by Whittlesea and colleagues (e.g., Whittlesea & Williams, 2001a) and the generality of discrepancy effect in prospective memory (PM) reported by McDaniel and colleagues (e.g., McDaniel, Guynn, Einstein, & Breneiser, 2004). Experiments 1a and 2 tested the claim that discrepancy, elicited by mismatching the expected and the actual processing fluency, can give rise to familiarity under an RM context and increase familiarity judgments of discrepant items, independent of previous encounters with those items. Experiment 1b tested the claim that, within a PM context, such discrepancy can signal that discrepant items are significant and this significance can initiate the search for the source of the significance, thereby enhancing PM performance for discrepant PM cues. The current project attempted to elicit discrepancy by implementing a processing fluency paradigm with masked priming and a modified perceptual mask for Experiments 1a and 1b or high and low frequency words for Experiment 2. The discrepancy was manipulated by mismatching/matching the processing fluency of some items to the processing fluency of other items (e.g., fluent items embedded within disfluent items = discrepant items). In Experiment 1a, hit rates were higher for more fluently processed items (i.e., items with no perceptual mask) than less fluently processed items (items with a difficult perceptual mask), independent of discrepancy. In Experiment 2, hit rates were higher for low frequency words than high frequency words, independent of discrepancy. Furthermore, both in Experiments 1a and 2, false alarm rates did not differ as a function of discrepancy, fluency, or word frequency. In Experiment 1b, PM performance did not differ between discrepant and nondiscrepant PM cues. These results suggest that the discrepancy effects in RM and PM might not be as general as previously claimed

Semantic radical consistency and character transparency effects in Chinese: an ERP study

BACKGROUND: This event-related potential (ERP) study aims to investigate the representation and temporal dynamics of Chinese orthography-to-semantics mappings by simultaneously manipulating character transparency and semantic radical consistency. Character components, referred to as radicals, make up the building blocks used dur...postprin

Plasticity of grammatical recursion in German learners of Dutch

Previous studies have examined cross-serial and embedded complement clauses in West Germanic in order to distinguish between different types of working memory models of human sentence processing, as well as different formal language models. Here, adult plasticity in the use of these constructions is investigated by examining the response of German-speaking learners of Dutch using magnetoencephalography (MEG). In three experimental sessions spanning their initial acquisition of Dutch, participants performed a sentence-scene matching task with Dutch sentences including two different verb constituent orders (Dutch verb order, German verb order), and in addition rated similar constructions in a separate rating task. The average planar gradient of the evoked field to the initial verb within the cluster revealed a larger evoked response for the German order relative to the Dutch order between 0.2 to 0.4 s over frontal sensors after 2 weeks, but not initially. The rating data showed that constructions consistent with Dutch grammar, but inconsistent with the German grammar were initially rated as unacceptable, but this preference reversed after 3 months. The behavioural and electrophysiological results suggest that cortical responses to verb order preferences in complement clauses can change within 3 months after the onset of adult language learning, implying that this aspect of grammatical processing remains plastic into adulthood

Error Signals from the Brain: 7th Mismatch Negativity Conference

The 7th Mismatch Negativity Conference presents the state of the art in methods, theory, and application (basic and clinical research) of the MMN (and related error signals of the brain). Moreover, there will be two pre-conference workshops: one on the design of MMN studies and the analysis and interpretation of MMN data, and one on the visual MMN (with 20 presentations). There will be more than 40 presentations on hot topics of MMN grouped into thirteen symposia, and about 130 poster presentations. Keynote lectures by Kimmo Alho, Angela D. Friederici, and Israel Nelken will round off the program by covering topics related to and beyond MMN