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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics From Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis On Twitter Users, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen Dec 2017

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics From Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis On Twitter Users, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ …


Multilingual Sentiment Analysis : From Formal To Informal And Scarce Resource Languages, Siaw Ling Lo, Erik Cambria, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth Dec 2017

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis : From Formal To Informal And Scarce Resource Languages, Siaw Ling Lo, Erik Cambria, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to analyse online user-generated content related to sentiments (e.g., thoughts and opinions) on products or policies has become a de-facto skillset for many companies and organisations. Besides the challenge of understanding formal textual content, it is also necessary to take into consideration the informal and mixed linguistic nature of online social media languages, which are often coupled with localised slang as a way to express ‘true’ feelings. Due to the multilingual nature of social media data, analysis based on a single official language may carry the risk of not capturing the overall sentiment of online content. While efforts …


Tweet Geolocation: Leveraging Location, User And Peer Signals, Wen-Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim Nov 2017

Tweet Geolocation: Leveraging Location, User And Peer Signals, Wen-Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Which venue is a tweet posted from? We referred this as fine-grained geolocation. To solve this problem effectively, we develop novel techniques to exploit each posting user's content history. This is motivated by our finding that most users do not share their visitation history, but have ample content history from tweet posts. We formulate fine-grained geolocation as a ranking problem whereby given a test tweet, we rank candidate venues. We propose several models that leverage on three types of signals from locations, users and peers. Firstly, the location signals are words that are indicative of venues. We propose a location-indicative …


Interactive Social Recommendation, Xin Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chenghao Liu, Martin Ester Nov 2017

Interactive Social Recommendation, Xin Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chenghao Liu, Martin Ester

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation has been an active research topic over the last decade, based on the assumption that social information from friendship networks is beneficial for improving recommendation accuracy, especially when dealing with cold-start users who lack sufficient past behavior information for accurate recommendation. However, it is nontrivial to use such information, since some of a person's friends may share similar preferences in certain aspects, but others may be totally irrelevant for recommendations. Thus one challenge is to explore and exploit the extend to which a user trusts his/her friends when utilizing social information to improve recommendations. On the other hand, …


Inferring Spread Of Readers’ Emotion Affected By Online News, Agus Sulistya, Ferdian Thung, David Lo Sep 2017

Inferring Spread Of Readers’ Emotion Affected By Online News, Agus Sulistya, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Depending on the reader, A news article may be viewed from many different perspectives, thus triggering different (and possibly contradicting) emotions. In this paper, we formulate a problem of predicting readers’ emotion distribution affected by a news article. Our approach analyzes affective annotations provided by readers of news articles taken from a non-English online news site. We create a new corpus from the annotated articles, and build a domain-specific emotion lexicon and word embedding features. We finally construct a multi-target regression model from a set of features extracted from online news articles. Our experiments show that by combining lexicon and …


Real-Time Influence Maximization On Dynamic Social Streams, Yanhao Wang, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan Aug 2017

Real-Time Influence Maximization On Dynamic Social Streams, Yanhao Wang, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influence maximization (IM), which selects a set of k users(called seeds) to maximize the influence spread over a social network, is a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications such as viral marketing and network monitoring.Existing IM solutions fail to consider the highly dynamic nature of social influence, which results in either poor seed qualities or long processing time when the network evolves.To address this problem, we define a novel IM query named Stream Influence Maximization (SIM) on social streams.Technically, SIM adopts the sliding window model and maintains a set of k seeds with the largest influence value over …


Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective Of Middle Eastern Users, Salminen Joni, Sercan Sengün, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell Aug 2017

Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective Of Middle Eastern Users, Salminen Joni, Sercan Sengün, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative …


The Role Of Different Tie Strength In Disseminating Different Topics On A Microblog, Felicia Natali, Kathleen M. Carley, Feida Zhu, Binxuan Huang Jul 2017

The Role Of Different Tie Strength In Disseminating Different Topics On A Microblog, Felicia Natali, Kathleen M. Carley, Feida Zhu, Binxuan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The study of information flow typically does not distinguish the choices of tie strength on which the information flows. All receivers of the information are assumed to have the same potential to pass on the information. Modifying the SEIZ (susceptible, exposed, infected, skeptic) model, we discover that people choose to retweet strong or weak ties based on the topic. We made two modifications in the model. In the first modification (Model I), we assume that the contact rates of agents in different compartment and the probability of an agent transitioning from one compartment to another are different for strong ties …


A Domain Based Approach To Social Relation Recognition, Qianru Sun, Bernt Schiele, Mario Fritz Jul 2017

A Domain Based Approach To Social Relation Recognition, Qianru Sun, Bernt Schiele, Mario Fritz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social relations are the foundation of human daily life. Developing techniques to analyze such relations from visual data bears great potential to build machines that better understand us and are capable of interacting with us at a social level. Previous investigations have remained partial due to the overwhelming diversity and complexity of the topic and consequently have only focused on a handful of social relations. In this paper, we argue that the domain-based theory from social psychology is a great starting point to systematically approach this problem. The theory provides coverage of all aspects of social relations and equally is …


Demographics Of News Sharing In The U.S. Twittersphere, Julio C.S. Reis, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Johnnatan Messias, Benevenuto Fabrıcio. Jul 2017

Demographics Of News Sharing In The U.S. Twittersphere, Julio C.S. Reis, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Johnnatan Messias, Benevenuto Fabrıcio.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white users tend to …


Understanding Music Track Popularity In A Social Network, Jing Ren, Robert J. Kauffman Jun 2017

Understanding Music Track Popularity In A Social Network, Jing Ren, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Thousands of music tracks are uploaded to the Internet every day through websites and social networks that focus on music. While some content has been popular for decades, some tracks that have just been released have been ignored. What makes a music track popular? Can the duration of a music track’s popularity be explained and predicted? By analysing data on the performance of a music track on the ranking charts, coupled with the creation of machine-generated music semantics constructs and a variety of other track, artist and market descriptors, this research tests a model to assess how track popularity and …


The Retransmission Of Rumor And Rumor Correction Messages On Twitter, Alton Y. K. Chua, Cheng-Ying Tee, Augustine Pang, Ee-Peng Lim Jun 2017

The Retransmission Of Rumor And Rumor Correction Messages On Twitter, Alton Y. K. Chua, Cheng-Ying Tee, Augustine Pang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article seeks to examine the relationships among source credibility, message plausibility, message type (rumor or rumor correction) and retransmission of tweets in a rumoring situation. From a total of 5,885 tweets related to the rumored death of the founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, 357 original tweets without an “RT” prefix were selected and analyzed using negative binomial regression analysis. The results show that source credibility and message plausibility are correlated with retransmission. Also, rumor correction tweets are retweeted more than rumor tweets. Moreover, message type moderates the relationship between source credibility and retransmission as well as that …


Fusing Social Media And Mobile Analytics For Urban Sense-Making, Archan Misra May 2017

Fusing Social Media And Mobile Analytics For Urban Sense-Making, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The project was motivated by the observation that urban environments are increasingly characterized by a variety of non-traditional “sensors”, whose data streams can be harnessed to infer a variety of latent events and urban context. For example, users spontaneously generate huge amounts of content (text, images and video) on social network channels, whereas GPS & other sensors on taxis and buses increasingly provide near-real time traces of their movement throughout the city. Similarly, advances in Wi-Fi based sensing allow us to passively capture the individual and collective movement of visitors across various public spaces, such as college campuses, museums and …


Discovering Your Selling Points: Personalized Social Influential Tags Exploration, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Ju Fan, Dongxiang Zhang May 2017

Discovering Your Selling Points: Personalized Social Influential Tags Exploration, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Ju Fan, Dongxiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social influence has attracted significant attention owing to the prevalence of social networks (SNs). In this paper, we study a new social influence problem, called personalized social influential tags exploration (PITEX), to help any user in the SN explore how she influences the network. Given a target user, it finds a size-k tag set that maximizes this user’s social influence. We prove the problem is NP-hard to be approximated within any constant ratio. To solve it, we introduce a sampling-based framework, which has an approximation ratio of 1−ǫ 1+ǫ with high probabilistic guarantee. To speedup the computation, we devise more …


Exploiting Contextual Information For Fine-Grained Tweet Geolocation, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim May 2017

Exploiting Contextual Information For Fine-Grained Tweet Geolocation, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of fine-grained tweet geolocation is to link tweets to their posting venues. We solve this in a learning to rank framework by ranking candidate venues given a test tweet. The problem is challenging as tweets are short and the vast majority are non-geocoded, meaning information is sparse for building models. Nonetheless, although only a small fraction of tweets are geocoded, we find that they are posted by a substantial proportion of users. Essentially, such users have location history data. Along with tweet posting time, these serve as additional contextual information for geolocation. In designing our geolocation models, we …


Persona Generation From Aggregated Social Media Data, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, Bernard J. Jansen May 2017

Persona Generation From Aggregated Social Media Data, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a methodology for persona generation using real time social media data for the distribution of products via online platforms. From a large social media account containing more than 30 million interactions from users from 181 countries engaging with more than 4,200 digital products produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology can first identify both distinct and impactful user segments and then create persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent features, such as names, photos, and personal attributes. We validate our approach by implementing the methodology into an actual working system that leverages large scale online …


On Analyzing User Topic-Specific Platform Preferences Across Multiple Social Media Sites, Roy Ka Wei Lee, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim Apr 2017

On Analyzing User Topic-Specific Platform Preferences Across Multiple Social Media Sites, Roy Ka Wei Lee, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic modeling has traditionally been studied for single text collections and applied to social media data represented in the form of text documents. With the emergence of many social media platforms, users find themselves using different social media for posting content and for social interaction. While many topics may be shared across social media platforms, users typically show preferences of certain social media platform(s) over others for certain topics. Such platform preferences may even be found at the individual level. To model social media topics as well as platform preferences of users, we propose a new topic model known as …


Collective Entity Linking In Tweets Over Space And Time, Wen Haw Chong, Ee-Peng Lim, William Cohen Apr 2017

Collective Entity Linking In Tweets Over Space And Time, Wen Haw Chong, Ee-Peng Lim, William Cohen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose collective entity linking over tweets that are close in space and time. This exploits the fact that events or geographical points of interest often result in related entities being mentioned in spatio-temporal proximity. Our approach directly applies to geocoded tweets. Where geocoded tweets are overly sparse among all tweets, we use a relaxed version of spatial proximity which utilizes both geocoded and non-geocoded tweets linked by common mentions. Entity linking is affected by noisy mentions extracted and incomplete knowledge bases. Moreover, to perform evaluation on the entity linking results, much manual annotation of mentions is often required. To …


Now You See It, Now You Don't! A Study Of Content Modification Behavior In Facebook, Fuxiang Chen, Ee-Peng Lim Apr 2017

Now You See It, Now You Don't! A Study Of Content Modification Behavior In Facebook, Fuxiang Chen, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media, as a major platform to disseminate information, has changed the way users and communities contribute content. In this paper, we aim to study content modifications on public Facebook pages operated by news media, community groups, and bloggers. We also study the possible reasons behind them, and their effects on user interaction. We conducted a detailed study of Content Censorship (CC) and Content Edit (CE) in Facebook using a detailed longitudinal dataset consisting of 57 public Facebook pages over 3 weeks covering 145,955 posts and 9,379,200 comments. We detected many CC and CE activities between 28% and 56% of …


Modeling Topics And Behavior Of Microbloggers: An Integrated Approach, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim Apr 2017

Modeling Topics And Behavior Of Microbloggers: An Integrated Approach, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging encompasses both user-generated content and behavior. When modeling microblogging data, one has to consider personal and background topics, as well as how these topics generate the observed content and behavior. In this article, we propose the Generalized Behavior-Topic (GBT) model for simultaneously modeling background topics and users' topical interest in microblogging data. GBT considers multiple topical communities (or realms) with different background topical interests while learning the personal topics of each user and the user's dependence on realms to generate both content and behavior. This differentiates GBT from other previous works that consider either one realm only or content …


Inferring User Consumption Preferences From Social Media, Yang Li, Jing Jiang, Ting Liu Mar 2017

Inferring User Consumption Preferences From Social Media, Yang Li, Jing Jiang, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social Media has already become a new arena of our lives and involved different aspects of our social presence. Users' personal information and activities on social media presumably reveal their personal interests, which offer great opportunities for many e-commerce applications. In this paper, we propose a principled latent variable model to infer user consumption preferences at the category level (e.g. inferring what categories of products a user would like to buy). Our model naturally links users' published content and following relations on microblogs with their consumption behaviors on e-commerce websites. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly …


Modeling Adoption Dynamics In Social Networks, Minh Duc Luu Feb 2017

Modeling Adoption Dynamics In Social Networks, Minh Duc Luu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation studies the modeling of user-item adoption dynamics where an item can be an innovation, a piece of contagious information or a product. By “adoption dynamics” we refer to the process of users making decision choices to adopt items based on a variety of user and item factors. In the context of social networks, “adoption dynamics” is closely related to “item diffusion”. When a user in a social network adopts an item, she may influence her network neighbors to adopt the item. Those neighbors of her who adopt the item then continue to trigger more adoptions. As this progress …


Discovering Burst Patterns Of Burst Topic In Twitter, Guozhong Dong, Wu Yang, Feida Zhu, Wei Wang Feb 2017

Discovering Burst Patterns Of Burst Topic In Twitter, Guozhong Dong, Wu Yang, Feida Zhu, Wei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become one of largest social networks for users to broadcast burst topics. There have been many studies on how to detect burst topics. However, mining burst patterns in burst topics has not been solved by the existing works. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mining burst patterns of burst topic in Twitter. A burst topic user graph model is proposed, which can represent the topology structure of burst topic propagation across a large number of Twitter users. Based on the model, hierarchical clustering is applied to cluster burst topics and reveal burst patterns from the macro …


Harnessing Twitter To Support Serendipitous Learning Of Developers, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, David Lo, Aiko Yamashita Feb 2017

Harnessing Twitter To Support Serendipitous Learning Of Developers, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, David Lo, Aiko Yamashita

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often rely on various online resources, such as blogs, to keep themselves up-to-date with the fast pace at which software technologies are evolving. Singer et al. found that developers tend to use channels such as Twitter to keep themselves updated and support learning, often in an undirected or serendipitous way, coming across things that they may not apply presently, but which should be helpful in supporting their developer activities in future. However, identifying relevant and useful articles among the millions of pieces of information shared on Twitter is a non-trivial task. In this work to support serendipitous discovery of …


Viewed By Too Many Or Viewed Too Little: Using Information Dissemination For Audience Segmentation, Bernard J. Jansen, Soon-Gyu Jung, Joni Salminen, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak Jan 2017

Viewed By Too Many Or Viewed Too Little: Using Information Dissemination For Audience Segmentation, Bernard J. Jansen, Soon-Gyu Jung, Joni Salminen, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The identification of meaningful audience segments, such as groups of users, consumers, readers, audience, etc., has important applicability in a variety of domains, including for content publishing. In this research, we seek to develop a technique for determining both information dissemination and information discrimination of online content in order to isolate audience segments. The benefits of the technique include identification of the most impactful content for analysis. With 4,320 online videos from a major news organization, a set of audience attributes, and more than 58 million interactions from hundreds of thousands of users, we isolate the key pieces of content …


Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media With Emotion Sensing, Zhaoxia Wang, Chee Seng Chong, Landy Lan, Yinping Yang, Beng-Seng Ho, Joo Chuan Tong Jan 2017

Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media With Emotion Sensing, Zhaoxia Wang, Chee Seng Chong, Landy Lan, Yinping Yang, Beng-Seng Ho, Joo Chuan Tong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media is arguably the richest source of human generated text input. Opinions, feedbacks and critiques provided by internet users reflect attitudes and sentiments towards certain topics, products, or services. The sheer volume of such information makes it effectively impossible for any group of persons to read through. Thus, social media sentiment analysis has become an important area of work to make sense of the social media talk. However, most existing sentiment analysis techniques focus only on the aggregate level, classifying sentiments broadly into positive, neutral or negative, and lack the capabilities to perform fine-grained sentiment analysis. This paper describes …