Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Impact Of Difficult Negatives On Twitter Crisis Detection, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become an alternative information source during a crisis. However, the short, noisy nature of tweets hinders information extraction. While models trained with standard Twitter crisis datasets accomplished decent performance, it remained a challenge to generalize to unseen crisis events. Thus, we proposed adding “difficult” negative examples during training to improve model generalization for Twitter crisis detection. Although adding random noise is a common practice, the impact of difficult negatives, i.e., negative data semantically similar to true examples, was never examined in NLP. Most of existing research focuses on the classification task, without considering the primary information need of …

Champions For Social Good: How Can We Discover Social Sentiment And Attitude-Driven Patterns In Prosocial Communication?, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Robert J. Kauffman, Helle Zinner Henriksen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is pursuing a social media strategy to inform people about displaced populations and refugee emergencies. It is actively engaging public figures to increase awareness through its prosocial communications and improve social informedness and support for policy changes in its services. We studied the Twitter communications of UNHCR social media champions and investigated their role as high-profile influencers. In this study, we offer a design science research and data analytics framework and propositions based on the social informedness theory we propose in this paper to assess communication about UNHCR’s mission. Two variables—refugee-emergency and champion …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …

Does Active Service Intervention Drive More Complaints On Social Media? The Roles Of Service Quality And Awareness, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite many advantages of social media as a customer service channel, there is a concern that active service intervention encourages excessive service complaints. Our paper casts doubt on this misconception by examining the dynamics between social media customer complaints and brand service interventions. We find service interventions indeed cause more complaints, yet this increase is driven by service awareness rather than chronic complaining. Due to the publicity and connectivity of social media, customers learn about the new service channel by observing customer service delivery to others – a mechanism that is unique to social media customer service and does not …

View, Like, Comment, Post: Analyzing User Engagement By Topic At 4 Levels Across 5 Social Media Platforms For 53 News Organizations, Kholoud K. Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We evaluate the effects of the topics of social media posts on audiences across five social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit) at four levels of user engagement. We collected 3,163,373 social posts from 53 news organizations across five platforms during an 8month period. We analyzed the differences in news organization platform strategies by focusing on topic variations by organization and the corresponding effect on user engagement at four levels. Findings show that topic distribution varies by platform, although there are some topics that are popular across most platforms. User engagement levels vary both by topics and …

The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory Of Organised Social Media Manipulation, Samantha Bradshaw, Philip N. Howard

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary

Over the past three years, we have monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties. Our 2019 report analyses the trends of computational propaganda and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources.

1. Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017. In each country, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically.

2.Social media has become co-opted by many authoritarian regimes. In 26 countries, computational propaganda …

Recommending Who To Follow In The Software Engineering Twitter Space, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, Dinusha Wijedasa, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social media, developers are increasingly using it in their software development activities. Twitter is one of the popular social mediums used by developers. A recent study by Singer et al. found that software developers use Twitter to “keep up with the fast-paced development landscape.” Unfortunately, due to the general-purpose nature of Twitter, it’s challenging for developers to use Twitter for their development activities. Our survey with 36 developers who use Twitter in their development activities highlights that developers are interested in following specialized software gurus who share relevant technical tweets.To help developers perform this task, in …

Offline Versus Online: A Meaningful Categorization Of Ties For Retweets, Felicia Natali, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the recent proliferation of news being shared through online social networks, it is crucial to determine how news is spread and what drives people to share certain stories. In this paper, we focus on the social networking site Twitter and analyse user’s retweets. We study retweeting patterns between offline and online friends, particularly, how tweet novelty and tweet topic differ between tweets retweeted by offline friends and those retweeted by online friends.

Temporal And Spatiotemporal Investigation Of Tourist Attraction Visit Sentiment On Twitter, Jose J. Padilla, Hamdi Kavak, Christopher J. Lynch, Ross J. Gore, Saikou Y. Diallo

VMASC Publications

In this paper, we propose a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists' emotions when visiting a city's tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include day of the year, season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather, as well as special days and …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Infodemiology For Syndromic Surveillance Of Dengue And Typhoid Fever In The Philippines, Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar, Kennedy E. Espina

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Finding determinants of disease outbreaks before its occurrence is necessary in reducing its impact in populations. The supposed advantage of obtaining information brought by automated systems fall short because of the inability to access real-time data as well as interoperate fragmented systems, leading to longer transfer and processing of data. As such, this study presents the use of realtime latent data from social media, particularly from Twitter, to complement existing disease surveillance efforts. By being able to classify infodemiological (health-related) tweets, this study is able to produce a range of possible disease incidences of Dengue and Typhoid Fever within the …

Efficient Online Summarization Of Large-Scale Dynamic Networks, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu, Feida Zhu, Christian S. Jensen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information diffusion in social networks is often characterized by huge participating communities and viral cascades of high dynamicity. To observe, summarize, and understand the evolution of dynamic diffusion processes in an informative and insightful way is a challenge of high practical value. However, few existing studies aim to summarize networks for interesting dynamic patterns. Dynamic networks raise new challenges not found in static settings, including time sensitivity, online interestingness evaluation, and summary traceability, which render existing techniques inadequate. We propose dynamic network summarization to summarize dynamic networks with millions of nodes by only capturing the few most interesting nodes or …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

Detecting Community Pacemakers 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 broad-cast burst topics. Influential users usually have a large number of followers and play an important role in the diffusion of burst topic. There have been many studies on how to detect influential users. However, traditional influential users detection approaches have largely ignored influential users in user community. In this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting community pacemakers. Community pacemakers are defined as the influential users that promote early diffusion in the user community of burst topic. To solve this problem, we present DCPBT, a framework that can …

Extending The Network: The Influence Of Offline Friendship On Twitter Network, Young Soo Kim, Kyungsub Stephen Choi, Felicia Natali

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter effectively provides a communication platform that allows users to strengthen or augment relationships with their close ones. It is a common scene to see groups of people in continuing group communication from offline to online using tools such as Twitter. Furthermore, it is also possible to meet new friends via online encounter. Under these circumstances, there would be friends who are both offline and online, or only in online. Many of earlier Twitter network studies focused on the network effects’ direction going from online to offline network. This paper explores the opposite direction, going from offline to online network. …

Can Instagram Posts Help Characterize Urban Micro-Events?, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media content, from platforms such as Twitter and Foursquare, has enabled an exciting new field of social sensing, where participatory content generated by users has been used to identify unexpected emerging or trending events. In contrast to such text-based channels, we focus on image-sharing social applications (specifically Instagram), and investigate how such urban social sensing can leverage upon the additional multi-modal, multimedia content. Given the significantly higher fraction of geotagged content on Instagram, we aim to use such channels to go beyond identification of long-lived events (e.g., a marathon) to achieve finer-grained characterization of multiple micro-events (e.g., a person …

Collective Rumor Correction On The Death Hoax Of A Political Figure In Social Media, Alton Y. K. Chua, Sin-Mei Cheah, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversations on social media networks that discuss a crisis incident as it unfolds have become a norm in recent years. Left to its own devices, such conversations could quickly degenerate into rumor mills. Little research has thus far examined the correction of rumors on social media. Using the third person effect as a theoretical underpinning, we developed a model of collective rumor correction on social media based on an incident surrounding the death hoax of a political figure. Tweets from Twitter were collected and analyzed for the period when a spike of circulating rumors speculating the demise of Singapore's first …

#Greysanatomy Vs. #Yankees: Demographics And Hashtag Use On Twitter, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to the lack of such information. In this work, we use state-of-the-art face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York. For the period from November 1, 2014 to October 31, 2015, we study which hashtags are used by different demographic groups. Though we find considerable overlap for the most popular hashtags, there are also …

Make A Twitter Bot In Python: Iterative Code Examples, Robin Camille Davis, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

A tutorial based upon the LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee’s “Build Your Own Twitter Bot” day in December 2015, which was billed as a gentle introduction to programming in Python.

Learning To Find Topic Experts In Twitter Via Different Relations, Wei Wei, Gao Cong, Chunyan Miao, Feida Zhu, Guohui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Expert finding has become a hot topic along with the flourishing of social networks, such as micro-blogging services like Twitter. Finding experts in Twitter is an important problem because tweets from experts are valuable sources that carry rich information (e.g., trends) in various domains. However, previous methods cannot be directly applied to Twitter expert finding problem. Recently, several attempts use the relations among users and Twitter Lists for expert finding. Nevertheless, these approaches only partially utilize such relations. To this end, we develop a probabilistic method to jointly exploit three types of relations (i.e., follower relation, user-list relation and list-list …

Ranking Of High-Value Social Audiences On Twitter, Siaw Ling Lo, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Even though social media offers plenty of business opportunities, for a company to identify the right audience from the massive amount of social media data is highly challenging given finite resources and marketing budgets. In this paper, we present a ranking mechanism that is capable of identifying the top-k social audience members on Twitter based on an index. Data from three different Twitter business account owners were used in our experiments to validate this ranking mechanism. The results show that the index developed using a combination of semi-supervised and supervised learning methods is indeed generic enough to retrieve relevant audience …

Friendship Maintenance And Prediction In Multiple Social Networks, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the proliferation of online social networks (OSNs), users find themselves participating in multiple OSNs. These users leave their activity traces as they maintain friendships and interact with other users in these OSNs. In this work, we analyze how users maintain friendship in multiple OSNs by studying users who have accounts in both Twitter and Instagram. Specifically, we study the similarity of a user's friendship and the evenness of friendship distribution in multiple OSNs. Our study shows that most users in Twitter and Instagram prefer to maintain different friendships in the two OSNs, keeping only a small clique of …

Investigating The Influence Of Offline Friendship On Twitter Networking Behaviors, Young Soo Kim, Felicia Natali, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the influence of offline friendship in three specific areas of Twitter networking behaviors: (a) network structure, (b) Twitter content and (c) interaction on Twitter. We observe some interesting findings through the empirical analysis of 2193 pairs of users who are online friends. When these pairs of users know each other offline, they are more likely to (1) respond to the online gesture of friendship from their friend, (2) share mutual online friends, (3) distribute and gather information in their friend’s Twitter network, (4) pay attention to their friend’s tweets, (5) post tweets that might be of interest to …

Whom Should We Sense In 'Social Sensing' - Analyzing Which Users Work Best For Social Media Now-Casting, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given the ever increasing amount of publicly available social media data, there is growing interest in using online data to study and quantify phenomena in the offline 'real' world. As social media data can be obtained in near real-time and at low cost, it is often used for 'now-casting' indices such as levels of flu activity or unemployment. The term 'social sensing' is often used in this context to describe the idea that users act as 'sensors', publicly reporting their health status or job losses. Sensor activity during a time period is then typically aggregated in a 'one tweet, one …

What's Hot In Software Engineering Twitter Space?, Abhishek Sharma, Tian Yuan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a popular means to disseminate information and currently more than 300 million people are using it actively. Software engineers are no exception; Singer et al. have shown that many developers use Twitter to stay current with recent technological trends. At various time points, many users are posting microblogs (i.e., tweets) about the same topic in Twitter. We refer to this reasonably large set of topically-coherent microblogs in the Twitter space made at a particular point in time as an event. In this work, we perform an exploratory study on software engineering related events in Twitter. We collect a …

Classifying Political Similarity Of Twitter Users, William K. Paustian

Computer Science Summer Fellows

The emergence of large scale social networks has led to research in approaches to classify similar users on a network. While many such approaches use data mining techniques, recent efforts have focused on measuring the similarity of users using structural properties of the underlying graph representing the network. In this paper, we identify the Twitter followers of the 2016 presidential candidates and classify them as Democrat, Republican or Bipartisan. We did this by designing a new approach to measuring structural similarity, PolRANK. PolRANK computes the similarity of a pair of users by accounting for both the number of candidates they …

Mathematical Modeling Of Trending Topics On Twitter, Jonathan S. Skaza

Honors Projects in Mathematics

Created in 2006, Twitter is an online social networking service in which users share and read 140-character messages called Tweets. The site has approximately 288 million monthly active users who produce about 500 million Tweets per day. This study applies dynamical and statistical modeling strategies to quantify the spread of information on Twitter. Parameter estimates for the rates of infection and recovery are obtained using Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The methodological strategy employed is an extension of techniques traditionally used in an epidemiological and biomedical context (particularly in the spread of infectious disease). This study, which addresses …

Use Of A High-Value Social Audience Index For Target Audience Identification On Twitter, Siaw Ling Lo, David Cornforth, Raymond. Chiong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the large and growing user base of social media, it is not an easy feat to identify potential customers for business. This is mainly due to the challenge of extracting commercially viable contents from the vast amount of free-form conversations. In this paper, we analyse the Twitter content of an account owner and its list of followers through various text mining methods and segment the list of followers via an index. We have termed this index as the High-Value Social Audience (HVSA) index. This HVSA index enables a company or organisation to devise their marketing and engagement plan according …