Twitter, a microblogging service, has evolved into a powerful communication platform with millions of active users who generate immense volume of microposts on a daily basis. To facilitate effective categorization and easy search, users adopt hashtags, keywords or phrases preceded by hash (#) character. Successful prediction of the spread and propagation of information in the form of trending topics or hashtags in Twitter, could help real time identification of new trends and thus improve marketing efforts. Social theories such as consistency theory suggest that people prefer harmony or consistency in their thoughts. In Twitter, for example, users are more likely to adopt the same trending hashtag multiple times before it eventually dies. In this paper, we propose a low-rank weighted matrix factorization approach to model trending hashtag adoption in Twitter based on consistency theory. In particular, we first cast the problem of modeling trending hashtag adoption into an optimization problem, then integrate consistency theory into it as a regularization term and finally leverage widely used matrix factorization to solve the optimization. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other baselines in predicting whether a specific trending hashtag will be used by users in future.
@cite_18: Though word-of-mouth (w-o-m) communications is a pervasive and intriguing phenomenon, little is known on its underlying process of personal communications. Moreover as marketers are getting more interested in harnessing the power of w-o-m, for e-business and other net related activities, the effects of the different communications types on macro level marketing is becoming critical. In particular we are interested in the breakdown of the personal communication between closer and stronger communications that are within an individual's own personal group (strong ties) and weaker and less personal communications that an individual makes with a wide set of other acquaintances and colleagues (weak ties).
@cite_14: By increasing the popularity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, analysis of the structure of these networks receives significant attentions. The most important part of these analyses is towards detecting communities. The aforementioned structures are known with extremely high inter-connections versus few intra-connections in the graphs. In this paper, we have addressed the community detection problem by a novel framework based on Information Diffusion Model and Shapley Value Concept. Here, each node of the underlying graph is attributed to a rational agent trying to maximize its Shapley Value in the form of information it receives. Nash equilibrium of the game corresponds to the community structure of the graph. Compared with other methods, our approach demonstrates promising results on the well-known real world and synthetic graphs.
@cite_4: Social media forms a central domain for the production and dissemination of real-time information. Even though such flows of information have traditionally been thought of as diffusion processes over social networks, the underlying phenomena are the result of a complex web of interactions among numerous participants. Here we develop the Linear Influence Model where rather than requiring the knowledge of the social network and then modeling the diffusion by predicting which node will influence which other nodes in the network, we focus on modeling the global influence of a node on the rate of diffusion through the (implicit) network. We model the number of newly infected nodes as a function of which other nodes got infected in the past. For each node we estimate an influence function that quantifies how many subsequent infections can be attributed to the influence of that node over time. A nonparametric formulation of the model leads to a simple least squares problem that can be solved on large datasets. We validate our model on a set of 500 million tweets and a set of 170 million news articles and blog posts. We show that the Linear Influence Model accurately models influences of nodes and reliably predicts the temporal dynamics of information diffusion. We find that patterns of influence of individual participants differ significantly depending on the type of the node and the topic of the information.
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@cite_28: Discovering communities in popular social networks like Facebook has been receiving significant attentions recently. In this paper, inspired from real life, we have addressed the community detection problem by a framework based on Information Diffusion Model and Game Theory. In this approach, we consider each node of the social network as a selfish agent which has interactions with its neighbors and tries to maximize its total utility (i.e. received information). Finally community structure of the graph reveals after reaching to the local Nash equilibrium of the game. Experimental results on the benchmark social media datasets, synthetic and real world graphs demonstrate that our method is superior compared with the other state-of-the-art methods.
@cite_29: Most complex networks demonstrate a significant property 'community structure', meaning that the network nodes are often joined together in tightly knit groups or communities, while there are only looser connections between them. Detecting these groups is of great importance and has immediate applications, especially in the popular online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Many of these networks are divided into overlapping communities, i.e. communities with nodes belonging to more than one community simultaneously. Unfortunately most of the works cannot detect such communities. In this paper, we consider the formation of communities in social networks as an iterative game in a multiagent environment, in which, each node is regarded as an agent trying to be in the communities with members structurally equivalent to her. Remarkable results on the real world and benchmark graphs show efficiency of our approach in detecting overlapping communities compared to the other similar methods.
@cite_9: Identifying communities in social networks has been receiving the increasing attentions recently. However, the overlapping concept has received little attentions in the literature, although it is observed in almost all social networks. In this study, we propose a framework based on the game theory and the structural equivalence concept to address the detection of overlapping communities in social networks. Specifically, we consider the underlying graph as a hypothetical social networking website and regard each vertex of this graph as an agent performing in this multiagent environment. Since each agent may belong to several communities simultaneously, we are able to find overlapping community structure of social networks. The rigorous proof of the existence of Nash equilibrium in this game is provided which shows that the method always reaches to the final solution. Experimental results on the benchmark and real world graphs show superiority of our approach over the other state-of-the-art methods.
@cite_1: Sentiment analysis refers to the class of computational and natural language processing based techniques used to identify, extract or characterize subjective information, such as opinions, expressed in a given piece of text. The main purpose of sentiment analysis is to classify a writer’s attitude towards various topics into positive, negative or neutral categories. Sentiment analysis has many applications in different domains including, but not limited to, business intelligence, politics, sociology, etc. Recent years, on the other hand, have witnessed the advent of social networking websites, microblogs, wikis and Web applications and consequently, an unprecedented growth in user-generated data is poised for sentiment mining. Data such as web-postings, Tweets, videos, etc., all express opinions on various topics and events, offer immense opportunities to study and analyze human opinions and sentiment. In this chapter, we study the information published by individuals in social media in cases of natural disasters and emergencies and investigate if such information could be used by first responders to improve situational awareness and crisis management. In particular, we explore applications of sentiment analysis and demonstrate how sentiment mining in social media can be exploited to determine how local crowds react during a disaster, and how such information can be used to improve disaster management. Such information can also be used to help assess the extent of the devastation and find people who are in specific need during an emergency situation. We first provide the formal definition of sentiment analysis in social media and cover traditional and the state-of-the-art approaches while highlighting contributions, shortcomings, and pitfalls due to the composition of online media streams. Next we discuss the relationship among social media, disaster relief and situational awareness and explain how social media is used in these contexts with the focus on sentiment analysis. In order to enable quick analysis of real-time geo-distributed data, we will detail applications of visual analytics with an emphasis on sentiment visualization . Finally, we conclude the chapter with a discussion of research challenges in sentiment analysis and its application in disaster relief.
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@cite_23: Models of collective behavior are developed for situations where actors have two alternatives and the costs and or benefits of each depend on how many other actors choose which alternative. The key concept is that of "threshold": the number or proportion of others who must make one decision before a given actor does so; this is the point where net benefits begin to exceed net costs for that particular actor. Beginning with a frequency distribution of thresholds, the models allow calculation of the ultimate or "equilibrium" number making each decision. The stability of equilibrium results against various possible changes in threshold distributions is considered. Stress is placed on the importance of exact distributions distributions for outcomes. Groups with similar average preferences may generate very different results; hence it is hazardous to infer individual dispositions from aggregate outcomes or to assume that behavior was directed by ultimately agreed-upon norms. Suggested applications are to riot ...
@cite_16: Online social networks play a major role in the spread of information at very large scale. A lot of effort have been made in order to understand this phenomenon, ranging from popular topic detection to information diffusion modeling, including influential spreaders identification. In this article, we present a survey of representative methods dealing with these issues and propose a taxonomy that summarizes the state-of-the-art. The objective is to provide a comprehensive analysis and guide of existing efforts around information diffusion in social networks. This survey is intended to help researchers in quickly understanding existing works and possible improvements to bring.
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In the realm of social network analysis @cite_22 @cite_19 @cite_9 @cite_14 @cite_29 @cite_28 @cite_27 @cite_11 @cite_1 , diffusion of information has been an active research area in the social network analysis @cite_16 @cite_18 @cite_23 @cite_3 @cite_4 , however much less is known about spread of ideas in the form of hashtags. Specifically, prediction of adopting hashtags in a given time frame has been virtually an untrodden area yet.