Influence Level Prediction on Social Media through Multi-Task and Sociolinguistic User Characteristics Modeling

Prediction of a user’s influence level on social networks has attracted a lot of attention as human interactions move online. Influential users have the ability to influence others’ behavior to achieve their own agenda. As a result, predicting users’ level of influence online can help to understand social networks, forecast trends, prevent misinformation, etc. The research on user influence in social networks has attracted much attention across multiple disciplines, from social sciences to mathematics, yet it is still not well understood. One of the difficulties is that the definition of influence is specific to a particular problem or a domain, and it does not generalize well. Another challenge arises from the fact that all user interactions occur through text. Textual data limits access to non-verbal communication such as voice. These facts make the problem challenging. In this work, we define user influence level as a function of community endorsement, create a strong baseline, and develop new methods that significantly outperform our baseline by leveraging demographic and personality data. This dissertation is divided into three parts. In part one, we introduce the problem of influence level prediction, review influential research across different disciplines, and introduce our hypothesis that leverages user-centric information to improve user influence level prediction on social media. In part two, we answer the question of whether the language provides sufficient information to predict user- related information. We develop new methods that achieve good results on three tasks: relationship prediction, demographic prediction, and hedge sentence detection. In part three, we introduce our dataset, a new ranking algorithm, RankDCG, to assess the performance of ranking problems, and develop new user-centric models for user influence level prediction. These models show significant improvements across eight different domains ranging from politics and news to fitness

Hierarchy Prediction in Online Communities

With the development of the Internet, a big part of social interactions have moved online, and people have unconsciously brought their daily communicational habits to the web. Understanding these communications is important because it will lead to a better understanding of online communities, and can improve areas such as e-commerce, advertisement, topic modeling, security, and others. We propose to develop a natural language based ranking algorithm to predict user influence levels in online communication groups

Ranking knowledge graphs by capturing knowledge about languages and labels

Capturing knowledge about the mulitilinguality of a knowledge graph is of supreme importance to understand its applicability across multiple languages. Several metrics have been proposed for describing mulitilinguality at the level of a whole knowledge graph. Albeit enabling the understanding of the ecosystem of knowledge graphs in terms of the utilized languages, they are unable to capture a fine-grained description of the languages in which the different entities and properties of the knowledge graph are represented. This lack of representation prevents the comparison of existing knowledge graphs in order to decide which are the most appropriate for a multilingual application