12,788 research outputs found
DNA-inspired online behavioral modeling and its application to spambot detection
We propose a strikingly novel, simple, and effective approach to model online
user behavior: we extract and analyze digital DNA sequences from user online
actions and we use Twitter as a benchmark to test our proposal. We obtain an
incisive and compact DNA-inspired characterization of user actions. Then, we
apply standard DNA analysis techniques to discriminate between genuine and
spambot accounts on Twitter. An experimental campaign supports our proposal,
showing its effectiveness and viability. To the best of our knowledge, we are
the first ones to identify and adapt DNA-inspired techniques to online user
behavioral modeling. While Twitter spambot detection is a specific use case on
a specific social media, our proposed methodology is platform and technology
agnostic, hence paving the way for diverse behavioral characterization tasks
Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game
Social media has become a major communication channel for communities
centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data
source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games.
Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million
tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time
period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling.
Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their
playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player
communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter
characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and
uncovering broad topics of community interest.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Conference on Games 201
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