Sensing Subjective Well-being from Social Media

Subjective Well-being(SWB), which refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, is of great use to public policy-makers as well as economic, sociological research, etc. Traditionally, the measurement of SWB relies on time-consuming and costly self-report questionnaires. Nowadays, people are motivated to share their experiences and feelings on social media, so we propose to sense SWB from the vast user generated data on social media. By utilizing 1785 users' social media data with SWB labels, we train machine learning models that are able to "sense" individual SWB from users' social media. Our model, which attains the state-by-art prediction accuracy, can then be used to identify SWB of large population of social media users in time with very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figures, 2 tables, 10th International Conference, AMT 2014, Warsaw, Poland, August 11-14, 2014. Proceeding

Understanding Status Update in Microblog: A Perspective on Media Needs

Microblog has grown popularly as a seminal social medium for timely information seeking and sharing. However, the reason why individuals update real-time information in microblog has not been well understood, and empirical research to address this specific information behavior is hardly available. As a felt urge can be conceptualized as a precursor of real-time updating in the microblog, we attempt to capture the underlying mechanism in causing this less reflective behavior urge. We apply the media needs theory to investigate how the individuals’ media needs spark their urge to update personal status in the microblog. In particular, we conceptualize the cognitive needs as related to information uniqueness, personal integrative needs as related to connectivity, social integrative needs as a unidirectional relationship, affective needs as positive emotions and tension release needs as negative emotions. An online survey was employed to validate the proposed model within 523 microblog users in China. The results suggest that the users’ behavior urge is significantly influenced by information uniqueness, connectivity, unidirectional relationship and positive emotions. Furthermore, among the five media needs, the affective and social integrative related factors strongly determine the personal real-time status update in microblog. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed in this paper

Hot Topic Propagation Model and Opinion Leader Identifying Model in Microblog Network

As the network technique is fast developing, the microblog has been a significant carrier representing the social public opinions. Therefore, it is important to investigate the propagation characteristics of the topics and to unearth the opinion leaders in Micro-blog network. The propagation status of the hot topics in the Micro-blog is influenced by the authority of the participating individuals. We build a time-varying model with the variational external field strength to simulate the topic propagation process. This model also fits for the multimodal events. The opinion leaders are important individuals who remarkably influence the topic discussions in its propagation process. They can help to guide the healthy development of public opinion. We build an AHP model based on the influence, the support, and the activity of a node, as well as a microblog-rank algorithm based on the weighted undirected network, to unearth and analyze the opinion leaders’ characteristics. The experiments in the data, collected from the Sina Micro-blog from October 2012 to November 2012 and from January 2013 to February 2013, show that our models predict the trend of hot topic efficiently and the opinion leaders we found are reasonable

A Vertical PRF Architecture for Microblog Search

In microblog retrieval, query expansion can be essential to obtain good search results due to the short size of queries and posts. Since information in microblogs is highly dynamic, an up-to-date index coupled with pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) with an external corpus has a higher chance of retrieving more relevant documents and improving ranking. In this paper, we focus on the research question:how can we reduce the query expansion computational cost while maintaining the same retrieval precision as standard PRF? Therefore, we propose to accelerate the query expansion step of pseudo-relevance feedback. The hypothesis is that using an expansion corpus organized into verticals for expanding the query, will lead to a more efficient query expansion process and improved retrieval effectiveness. Thus, the proposed query expansion method uses a distributed search architecture and resource selection algorithms to provide an efficient query expansion process. Experiments on the TREC Microblog datasets show that the proposed approach can match or outperform standard PRF in MAP and NDCG@30, with a computational cost that is three orders of magnitude lower.Comment: To appear in ICTIR 201

A Dynamic Microblog Network and Information Dissemination in “@” Mode

Social media, especially the microblogs, emerge as a part of our daily life and become a key way to information spread. Thus, information dissemination in the microblog became a research hotspot. Based on some principles that are summarized from the microblog users’ behaviors, this paper proposes a dynamic microblog network model. Through simulations this network has the features of periodicity of average degree, high clustering coefficient, high degree of modularity, and community. Besides, an information dissemination model through “@” in the microblog has been presented. With the microblog network model and the zombie-city model, this paper has modelled an artificial microblog and has simulated the information dissemination in the artificial microblog with different scenes. Therefore, some interesting findings have been presented. (1) Due to a better connectivity, information could spread widely in a random network; (2) information spreads more quickly in a stable microblog network; (3) the decay rate of the relationships will have an effect on information dissemination; that is, with a lower decay rate, information spreads more quickly and widely; (4) the higher active level of users in microblog could promote information spread widely and quickly; (5) the “@” mode of information dissemination makes a high modularity of the information diffusion network

Technology Features, Empowering Perceptions, and Voicing Behavior on Microblog

Recently, we have observed rapid growth of individual daily technologies such as microblogs, and the technology’s influence on people’s social life. To investigate such self-determined technology usage, we choose an empowerment perspective as our theoretical lens, because the empowerment concept highlights human beings’ proactive nature. We investigate a specific microblog usage, i.e. publicly voicing personal views on social affairs, which is an initial yet fundamental step in citizen participation. The study reveals that microblog features have transformed the way social news disseminate, and hence influence information quality and users’ social network building. These changes further influence users’ empowerment perceptions through raising users’ perceptions of internal political self-efficacy, autonomy, meaning, and impact. The more empowered users are, the more likely users will voice on microblog. We integrate context into our theorizing, and the empowerment framework allow us to uncover the psychological mechanism through which microblog technology features enable voicing, a specific technology usage