Language Use Matters: Analysis of the Linguistic Structure of Question Texts Can Characterize Answerability in Quora

Quora is one of the most popular community Q&A sites of recent times. However, many question posts on this Q&A site often do not get answered. In this paper, we quantify various linguistic activities that discriminates an answered question from an unanswered one. Our central finding is that the way users use language while writing the question text can be a very effective means to characterize answerability. This characterization helps us to predict early if a question remaining unanswered for a specific time period t will eventually be answered or not and achieve an accuracy of 76.26% (t = 1 month) and 68.33% (t = 3 months). Notably, features representing the language use patterns of the users are most discriminative and alone account for an accuracy of 74.18%. We also compare our method with some of the similar works (Dror et al., Yang et al.) achieving a maximum improvement of ~39% in terms of accuracy.Comment: 1 figure, 3 tables, ICWSM 2017 as poste

Why Did They #Unfollow Me? Early Detection of Follower Loss on Twitter

Having more followers has become a norm in recent social media and micro-blogging communities. This battle has been taking shape from the early days of Twitter. Despite this strong competition for followers, many Twitter users are continuously losing their followers. This work addresses the problem of identifying the reasons behind the drop of followers of users in Twitter. As a first step, we extract various features by analyzing the content of the posts made by the Twitter users who lose followers consistently. We then leverage these features to early detect follower loss. We propose various models and yield an overall accuracy of 73% with high precision and recall. Our model outperforms baseline model by 19.67% (w.r.t accuracy), 33.8% (w.r.t precision) and 14.3% (w.r.t recall).Comment: 5 pages, 1 table, GROUP '1

"Woman-Metal-White vs Man-Dress-Shorts": Combining Social, Temporal and Image Signals to Understand Popularity of Pinterest Fashion Boards

Pinterest is a popular photo sharing website. Fashion is one the most popular and content generating category on this platform. Most of the popular fashion brands and designers use boards on Pinterest for showcasing their products. However, the characteristics of popular fashion boards are not well-known. These characteristics can be used for predicting popularity of a nascent board. Further, newly formed boards can organize their content in a way similar to the popular fashion boards to garner enhanced popularity. What properties on these fashion boards determine their popularity? Can these properties be systematically quantified? In this paper, we show how social, temporal and image signals can together help in characterizing the popular fashion boards. In particular, we study the sharing/borrowing behavior of pins and the image content characteristics of the fashion boards. We analyze the sharing behavior using social and temporal signals, and propose six novel yet simple metrics: originality score, retention coefficients, production coefficients, inter-copying time, duration of sharing and speed coefficients. We further study the image based content properties by extracting fashion, color and gender terms embedded in the pin images. We observe significant differences across the popular (highly followed or highly ranked by the experts) and the unpopular (less followed) boards. We then use these characteristic features to early predict the popularity of a board and achieve a high correlation of 0.874 with low RMSE value. Our key observation is that likes and repin retention coefficients are the most discriminatory factors of a board's popularity apart from the usage of various color, gender and fashion terms.Comment: 13 pages,4 figures, 14 tables, THE 13TH INTERNATIONAL AAAI CONFERENCE ON WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA (ICWSM-2019