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Anomaly Detection Through Enhanced Sentiment Analysis On Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor Joo, Chuan Tong, Xin Xin, Hoong Chor Chin Dec 2014

Anomaly Detection Through Enhanced Sentiment Analysis On Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor Joo, Chuan Tong, Xin Xin, Hoong Chor Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection in sentiment analysis refers to detecting abnormal opinions, sentiment patterns or special temporal aspects of such patterns in a collection of data. The anomalies detected may be due to sudden sentiment changes hidden in large amounts of text. If these anomalies are undetected or poorly managed, the consequences may be severe, e.g. A business whose customers reveal negative sentiments and will no longer support the establishment. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a vast source of information, which includes user feedback, opinion and information on most issues. Many organizations also leverage social media platforms to publish information …


Extracting Interest Tags From Twitter User Biographies, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang Dec 2014

Extracting Interest Tags From Twitter User Biographies, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms, has been studied from different angles. One of the important sources of information in Twitter is users’ biographies, which are short self-introductions written by users in free form. Biographies often describe users’ background and interests. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been much work trying to extract information from Twitter biographies. In this work, we study how to extract information revealing users’ personal interests from Twitter biographies. A sequential labeling model is trained with automatically constructed labeled data. The popular patterns expressing user interests are extracted and …


On Joint Modeling Of Topical Communities And Personal Interest In Microblogs, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim Nov 2014

On Joint Modeling Of Topical Communities And Personal Interest In Microblogs, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the Topical Communities and Personal Interest (TCPI) model for simultaneously modeling topics, topical communities, and users’ topical interests in microblogging data. TCPI considers different topical communities while differentiating users’ personal topical interests from those of topical communities, and learning the dependence of each user on the affiliated communities to generate content. This makes TCPI different from existing models that either do not consider the existence of multiple topical communities, or do not differentiate between personal and community’s topical interests. Our experiments on two Twitter datasets show that TCPI can effectively mine the representative topics for …


Entity Linking On Microblogs With Spatial And Temporal Signals, Yuan Fang, Ming-Wei Chang Oct 2014

Entity Linking On Microblogs With Spatial And Temporal Signals, Yuan Fang, Ming-Wei Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogs present an excellent opportunity for monitoring and analyzing world happenings. Given that words are often ambiguous, entity linking becomes a crucial step towards understanding microblogs. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of entity linking on microblogs. We first observe that spatiotemporal (i.e., spatial and temporal) signals play a key role, but they are not utilized in existing approaches. Thus, we propose a novel entity linking framework that incorporates spatiotemporal signals through a weakly supervised process. Using entity annotations1 on real-world data, our experiments show that the spatiotemporal model improves F1 by more than 10 points over existing systems. …


An Exploratory Study On Software Microblogger Behaviors, Yuan Tian, David Lo Sep 2014

An Exploratory Study On Software Microblogger Behaviors, Yuan Tian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services are growing rapidly in the recent years. Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging sites, has gained more than 500 millions users. Thousands of developers are also using Twitter to communicate with one another and microblog about software-related topics such as programming languages, code libraries, etc. Understanding the behaviors of software microbloggers is one of the needed first steps toward building automated tools to encourage software microblogging activities and harness software microblogging to improve various software engineering activities. In this paper, we investigate the behaviors of software microbloggers in terms of their microblogging frequency, generated contents, and interactions …


Sharing Political News: The Balancing Act Of Intimacy And Socialization In Selective Exposure, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft Sep 2014

Sharing Political News: The Balancing Act Of Intimacy And Socialization In Selective Exposure, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One might think that, compared to traditional media, social media sites allow people to choose more freely what to read and what to share, especially for politically oriented news. However, reading and sharing habits originate from deeply ingrained behaviors that might be hard to change. To test the extent to which this is true, we propose a Political News Sharing (PoNS) model that holistically captures four key aspects of social psychology: gratification, selective exposure, socialization, and trust & intimacy. Using real instances of political news sharing in Twitter, we study the predictive power of these features. As one might expect, …


Clear: A Real-Time Online Observatory For Bursty And Viral Events, Runquan Xie, Feida Zhu, Hui Ma, Wei Xie, Chen Lin Sep 2014

Clear: A Real-Time Online Observatory For Bursty And Viral Events, Runquan Xie, Feida Zhu, Hui Ma, Wei Xie, Chen Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our demonstration of CLEar (Clairaudient Ear), a real-time online platform for detecting, monitoring, summarizing, contextualizing and visualizing bursty and viral events, those triggering a sudden surge of public interest and going viral on micro-blogging platforms. This task is challenging for existing methods as they either use complicated topic models to analyze topics in a off-line manner or define temporal structure of fixed granularity on the data stream for online topic learning, leaving them hardly scalable for real-time stream like that of Twitter. In this demonstration of CLEar, we present a three-stage system: First, we show …


A Study Of Age Gaps Between Online Friends, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Heyan Huang Sep 2014

A Study Of Age Gaps Between Online Friends, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Heyan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User attribute extraction on social media has gain considerable attention, while existing methods are mostly supervised which suffer great diffi- culty in insufficient gold standard data. In this paper, we validate a strong hypothesis based on homophily and adapt it to ensure the certainty of user attribute we extracted via weakly supervised propagation. Homophily, the theory which states that people who are similar tend to become friends, has been well studied in the setting of online social networks. When we focus on age attribute, based on this theory, online friends tend to have similar age. In this work, we take …


Interestingness-Driven Diffussion Process Summarization In Dynamic Networks, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu, Christian Jensen, Feida Zhu, Christos Faloutsos Sep 2014

Interestingness-Driven Diffussion Process Summarization In Dynamic Networks, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu, Christian Jensen, Feida Zhu, Christos Faloutsos

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread use of social networks enables the rapid diffusion of information, e.g., news, among users in very large communities. It is a substantial challenge to be able to observe and understand such diffusion processes, which may be modeled as networks that are both large and dynamic. A key tool in this regard is data summarization. However, few existing studies aim to summarize graphs/networks for dynamics. Dynamic networks raise new challenges not found in static settings, including time sensitivity and the needs for online interestingness evaluation and summary traceability, which render existing techniques inapplicable. We study the topic of dynamic …


On Macro And Micro Exploration Of Hashtag Diffusion In Twitter, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng Aug 2014

On Macro And Micro Exploration Of Hashtag Diffusion In Twitter, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This exploratory work studies hashtag diffusion in Twitter. The analysis is conducted from two aspects. From the macro perspective, we study general properties of hashtag diffusion, and classify hashtags into three main classes based on their temporal dynamics referred as 'single spike', 'multi-spikes', and 'fluctuation', and find that each of these classes has some unique characteristics. From the micro perspective, we investigate individual diffusion.We adopt Edelman's 'topology of influence' theory to identify four type of users with different influence levels in diffusion based on their dynamic retweet behaviors. The results of our study are useful for gaining more insights of …


Generating Supplementary Travel Guides From Social Media, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang, Lifu Huang, Minghui Qiu, Lizi Liao Aug 2014

Generating Supplementary Travel Guides From Social Media, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang, Lifu Huang, Minghui Qiu, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study how to summarize travel-related information in forum threads to generate supplementary travel guides. Such summaries presumably can provide additional and more up-to-date information to tourists. Existing multi-document summarization methods have limitations for this task because (1) they do not generate structured summaries but travel guides usually follow a certain template, and (2) they do not put emphasis on named entities but travel guides often recommend points of interest to travelers. To overcome these limitations, we propose to use a latent variable model to align forum threads with the section structure of well-written travel guides. The …


On Predicting Religion Labels In Microblogging Networks, Minh Thap Nguyen, Ee Peng Lim Jul 2014

On Predicting Religion Labels In Microblogging Networks, Minh Thap Nguyen, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Religious belief plays an important role in how people behave, influencing how they form preferences, interpret events around them, and develop relationships with others. Traditionally, the religion labels of user population are obtained by conducting a large scale census study. Such an approach is both high cost and time consuming. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting users' religion labels using their microblogging data. We formulate religion label prediction as a classification task, and identify content, structure and aggregate features considering their self and social variants for representing a user. We introduce the notion of representative user to …


Influences Of Influential Users: An Empirical Study Of Music Social Network, Jing Ren, Zhiyong Cheng, Jialie Shen, Feida Zhu Jul 2014

Influences Of Influential Users: An Empirical Study Of Music Social Network, Jing Ren, Zhiyong Cheng, Jialie Shen, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influential user can play a crucial role in online social networks. This paper documents an empirical study aiming at exploring the effects of influential users in the context of music social network. To achieve this goal, music diffusion graph is developed to model how information propagates over network. We also propose a heuristic method to measure users' influences. Using the real data from Last. fm, our empirical test demonstrates key effects of influential users and reveals limitations of existing influence identification/characterization schemes.


Lifetime Lexical Variation In Social Media, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ying Ding, Heyan Huang, Ee Peng Lim Jul 2014

Lifetime Lexical Variation In Social Media, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ying Ding, Heyan Huang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the rapid growth of online social media attracts a large number of Internet users, the large volume of content generated by these users also provides us with an opportunity to study the lexical variation of people of different ages. In this paper, we present a latent variable model that jointly models the lexical content of tweets and Twitter users’ ages. Our model inherently assumes that a topic has not only a word distribution but also an age distribution. We propose a Gibbs-EM algorithm to perform inference on our model. Empirical evaluation shows that our model can learn meaningful age-specific …


Predicting The Popularity Of Web 2.0 Items Based On User Comments, Xiangnan He, Ming Gao, Min-Yen Kan, Yiqun Liu, Kazunari Sugiyama Jul 2014

Predicting The Popularity Of Web 2.0 Items Based On User Comments, Xiangnan He, Ming Gao, Min-Yen Kan, Yiqun Liu, Kazunari Sugiyama

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the current Web 2.0 era, the popularity of Web resources fluctuates ephemerally, based on trends and social interest. As a result, content-based relevance signals are insufficient to meet users' constantly evolving information needs in searching for Web 2.0 items. Incorporating future popularity into ranking is one way to counter this. However, predicting popularity as a third party (as in the case of general search engines) is difficult in practice, due to their limited access to item view histories. To enable popularity prediction externally without excessive crawling, we propose an alternative solution by leveraging user comments, which are more accessible …


Socio-Physical Analytics: Challenges & Opportunities, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shriguru Nayak, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim Jun 2014

Socio-Physical Analytics: Challenges & Opportunities, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shriguru Nayak, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we argue for expanded research into an area called Socio-Physical Analytics, that focuses on combining the behavioral insight gained from mobile-sensing based monitoring of physical behavior with the inter-personal relationships and preferences deduced from online social networks. We highlight some of the research challenges in combining these heterogeneous data sources and then describe some examples of our ongoing work (based on real-world data being collected at SMU) that illustrate two aspects of socio-physical analytics: (a) how additional demographic and online analytics based attributes can potentially provide better insights into the preferences and behaviors of individuals or groups …


Online Community Transition Detection, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu Jun 2014

Online Community Transition Detection, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mining user behavior patterns in social networks is of great importance in user behavior analysis, targeted marketing, churn prediction and other applications. However, less effort has been made to study the evolution of user behavior in social communities. In particular, users join and leave communities over time. How to automatically detect the online community transitions of individual users is a research problem of immense practical value yet with great technical challenges. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle to trace the evolution of community transition of individual users, adaptive to the noisy …


On Modeling Community Behaviors And Sentiments In Microblogging, Tuan Anh Hoang, William Cohen, Ee Peng Lim Apr 2014

On Modeling Community Behaviors And Sentiments In Microblogging, Tuan Anh Hoang, William Cohen, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the CBS topic model, a probabilistic graphical model, to derive the user communities in microblogging networks based on the sentiments they express on their generated content and behaviors they adopt. As a topic model, CBS can uncover hidden topics and derive user topic distribution. In addition, our model associates topic-specific sentiments and behaviors with each user community. Notably, CBS has a general framework that accommodates multiple types of behaviors simultaneously. Our experiments on two Twitter datasets show that the CBS model can effectively mine the representative behaviors and emotional topics for each community. We also …


Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process With A Duration-Based Discount For Event Identification From Twitter, Qiming Diao, Jing Jiang Apr 2014

Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process With A Duration-Based Discount For Event Identification From Twitter, Qiming Diao, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the fast development of social media on the Web, Twitter has become one of the major platforms for people to express themselves. Because of the wide adoption of Twitter, events like breaking news and release of popular videos can easily catch people’s attention and spread rapidly on Twitter, and the number of relevant tweets approximately reflects the impact of an event. Event identification and analysis on Twitter has thus become an important task. Recently the Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process (RCRP) has been successfully used for event identification from news streams and news-centric social media streams. However, these models …