11,860 research outputs found
Social influence analysis in microblogging platforms - a topic-sensitive based approach
The use of Social Media, particularly microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has proven to be an effective channel for promoting ideas to online audiences. In a world where information can bias public opinion it is essential to analyse the propagation and influence of information in large-scale networks. Recent research studying social media data to rank users by topical relevance have largely focused on the “retweet", “following" and “mention" relations. In this paper we propose the use of semantic profiles for deriving influential users based on the retweet subgraph of the Twitter graph. We introduce a variation of the PageRank algorithm for analysing users’ topical and entity influence based on the topical/entity relevance of a retweet relation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related algorithms including HITS, InDegree and Topic-Sensitive PageRank. We also introduce VisInfluence, a visualisation platform for presenting top influential users based on a topical query need
A large multilingual and multi-domain dataset for recommender systems
This paper presents a multi-domain interests dataset to train and test Recommender Systems, and the methodology to create the dataset
from Twitter messages in English and Italian. The English dataset includes an average of 90 preferences per user on music, books,
movies, celebrities, sport, politics and much more, for about half million users. Preferences are either extracted from messages of
users who use Spotify, Goodreads and other similar content sharing platforms, or induced from their ”topical” friends, i.e., followees
representing an interest rather than a social relation between peers. In addition, preferred items are matched with Wikipedia articles
describing them. This unique feature of our dataset provides a mean to derive a semantic categorization of the preferred items, exploiting
available semantic resources linked to Wikipedia such as the Wikipedia Category Graph, DBpedia, BabelNet and others
VIP: Incorporating Human Cognitive Biases in a Probabilistic Model of Retweeting
Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including
how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of
interest, users' tastes, and the `virality' of information, i.e., its
propensity to be adopted, or retweeted, upon exposure. Probabilistic models can
learn users' tastes from the history of their item adoptions and recommend new
items to users. However, current models ignore cognitive biases that are known
to affect behavior. Specifically, people pay more attention to items at the top
of a list than those in lower positions. As a consequence, items near the top
of a user's social media stream have higher visibility, and are more likely to
be seen and adopted, than those appearing below. Another bias is due to the
item's fitness: some items have a high propensity to spread upon exposure
regardless of the interests of adopting users. We propose a probabilistic model
that incorporates human cognitive biases and personal relevance in the
generative model of information spread. We use the model to predict how
messages containing URLs spread on Twitter. Our work shows that models of user
behavior that account for cognitive factors can better describe and predict
user behavior in social media.Comment: SBP 201
Shall I post this now? Optimized, delay-based privacy protection in social networks
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10115-016-1010-4Despite the several advantages commonly attributed to social networks such as easiness and immediacy to communicate with acquaintances and friends, significant privacy threats provoked by unexperienced or even irresponsible users recklessly publishing sensitive material are also noticeable. Yet, a different, but equally significant privacy risk might arise from social networks profiling the online activity of their users based on the timestamp of the interactions between the former and the latter. In order to thwart this last type of commonly neglected attacks, this paper proposes an optimized deferral mechanism for messages in online social networks. Such solution suggests intelligently delaying certain messages posted by end users in social networks in a way that the observed online activity profile generated by the attacker does not reveal any time-based sensitive information, while preserving the usability of the system. Experimental results as well as a proposed architecture implementing this approach demonstrate the suitability and feasibility of our mechanism.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
From the User to the Medium: Neural Profiling Across Web Communities
Online communities provide a unique way for individuals to access information
from those in similar circumstances, which can be critical for health
conditions that require daily and personalized management. As these groups and
topics often arise organically, identifying the types of topics discussed is
necessary to understand their needs. As well, these communities and people in
them can be quite diverse, and existing community detection methods have not
been extended towards evaluating these heterogeneities. This has been limited
as community detection methodologies have not focused on community detection
based on semantic relations between textual features of the user-generated
content. Thus here we develop an approach, NeuroCom, that optimally finds dense
groups of users as communities in a latent space inferred by neural
representation of published contents of users. By embedding of words and
messages, we show that NeuroCom demonstrates improved clustering and identifies
more nuanced discussion topics in contrast to other common unsupervised
learning approaches
Reciprocal Recommendation System for Online Dating
Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for
potential romantic partners. Different from traditional user-item
recommendations where the goal is to match items (e.g., books, videos, etc)
with a user's interests, a recommendation system for online dating aims to
match people who are mutually interested in and likely to communicate with each
other. We introduce similarity measures that capture the unique features and
characteristics of the online dating network, for example, the interest
similarity between two users if they send messages to same users, and
attractiveness similarity if they receive messages from same users. A
reciprocal score that measures the compatibility between a user and each
potential dating candidate is computed and the recommendation list is generated
to include users with top scores. The performance of our proposed
recommendation system is evaluated on a real-world dataset from a major online
dating site in China. The results show that our recommendation algorithms
significantly outperform previously proposed approaches, and the collaborative
filtering-based algorithms achieve much better performance than content-based
algorithms in both precision and recall. Our results also reveal interesting
behavioral difference between male and female users when it comes to looking
for potential dates. In particular, males tend to be focused on their own
interest and oblivious towards their attractiveness to potential dates, while
females are more conscientious to their own attractiveness to the other side of
the line
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