Social sentiment sensor: a visualization system for topic detection and topic sentiment analysis on microblog

As a new form of social media, microblogging provides platform sharing, wherein users can share their feelings and ideas on certain topics. Bursty topics from microblogs are the results of the emerging issues that instantly attract more followers and more attention online, which provide a unique opportunity to gauge the relation between expressed public sentiment and hot topics. This paper presents a Social Sentiment Sensor (SSS) system on Sina Weibo to detect daily hot topics and analyze the sentiment distributions toward these topics. SSS includes two main techniques, namely, hot topic detection and topic-oriented sentiment analysis. Hot topic detection aims to detect the most popular topics online based on the following steps, topic detection, topic clustering, and topic popularity ranking. We extracted topics from the hashtags using a hashtag filtering model because they can cover almost all the topics. Then, we cluster the topics that describe the same issue, and rank the topic clusters via their popularity to exploit the final hot topics. Topic-oriented sentiment analysis aims to analyze public opinions toward the hot topics. After retrieving the topic-related messages, we recognize sentiment for each message using a state-of-the-art SVM (Support Vector Machine) sentiment classifier. Then, we summarize the sentiments for the hot topic to achieve topic sentiment distribution. Based on the above framework and algorithms, SSS produces a real-time visualization system to monitor social sentiments, which is offering the public a new and timely perspective on the dynamics of the social topics.     

Automatic extraction of persistent topics from social text streams

Microblogging services allow users to publish their thoughts, activities, and interests in the form of text streams and to share them with others in a social network. A user’s text stream in a microblogging service is temporally composed of the posts the user has written or republished from other socially connected users. In this context, most research on the microblogging service has primarily focused on social graph or topic extraction from the text streams, and in particular, several studies attempted to discover user’s topics of interests from a text stream since the topics play a crucial role in user search, friend recommendation, and contextual advertisement. Yet, they did not yet fully address unique properties of the stream. In this paper, we study a problem of detecting the topics of long-term steady interests to a user from a text stream, considering its dynamic and social characteristics, and propose a graph-based topic extraction model. Extensive experiments have been carried out to investigate the effects of the proposed approach by using a real-world dataset, and the proposed model is shown to produce better performance than the existing alternatives.     

Search personalization through query and page topical analysis

Thousands of users issue keyword queries to the Web search engines to find information on a number of topics. Since the users may have diverse backgrounds and may have different expectations for a given query, some search engines try to personalize their results to better match the overall interests of an individual user. This task involves two great challenges. First the search engines need to be able to effectively identify the user interests and build a profile for every individual user. Second, once such a profile is available, the search engines need to rank the results in a way that matches the interests of a given user. In this article, we present our work towards a personalized Web search engine and we discuss how we addressed each of these challenges. Since users are typically not willing to provide information on their personal preferences, for the first challenge, we attempt to determine such preferences by examining the click history of each user. In particular, we leverage a topical ontology for estimating a user’s topic preferences based on her past searches, i.e. previously issued queries and pages visited for those queries. We then explore the semantic similarity between the user’s current query and the query-matching pages, in order to identify the user’s current topic preference. For the second challenge, we have developed a ranking function that uses the learned past and current topic preferences in order to rank the search results to better match the preferences of a given user. Our experimental evaluation on the Google query-stream of human subjects over a period of 1 month shows that user preferences can be learned accurately through the use of our topical ontology and that our ranking function which takes into account the learned user preferences yields significant improvements in the quality of the search results.     

基于信息内容和拓扑关系的社会媒体用户兴趣分类

随着社会的发展,信息已经成为社会发展越来越重要的部分,人类的信息传播活动越来越明显地展示出分众特征,对用户的分类成为人类信息活动的一个重要研究课题.从这一目标出发,分别基于信息内容、拓扑关系和两者综合的方法,按兴趣主题对社会媒体用户进行分类.对于基于信息内容的用户分类,采用LDA主题模型从用户所发布的内容中提取其主题分布,基于这一分布,采用支持向量机、决策树、贝叶斯等多种模型按兴趣主题对用户进行分类.对于基于拓扑关系的分类,依据相同兴趣主题的用户倾向于拥有共同的粉丝这一发现,构建分类模型来按兴趣主题对用户进行分类.然后提出综合信息内容和拓扑关系的分类方法来对用户进行分类.最后基于大规模Twitter数据的实验发现,采用综合方法对用户进行的兴趣分类性能明显高于采用单一信息内容或粉丝拓扑方法的性能.     

Discovering and tracking query oriented active online social groups in dynamic information network

The efficient identification of social groups with common interests is a key consideration for viral marketing in online social networking platforms. Most existing studies in social groups or community detection either focus on the common attributes of the nodes (users) or rely on only the topological links of the social network graph. The temporal evolution of user activities and interests have not been thoroughly studied to identify their effects on the formation of groups. In this paper, we investigate the problem of discovering and tracking time-sensitive activity driven user groups in dynamic social networks for a given input query consisting a set of topics. The users in these groups have the tendency to be temporally similar in terms of their activities on the topics of interest. To this end, we develop two baseline solutions to discover effective social groups. The first solution uses the network structure, whereas the second one uses the topics of common interest. We further propose an index-based method to incrementally track the evolution of groups with a lower computational cost. Our main idea is based on the observation that the degree of user activeness often degrades or upgrades widely over a period of time. The temporal tendency of user activities is modelled as the freshness of recent activities by tracking the social streams with a fading time window. We conduct extensive experiments on three real data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods. We also report some interesting observations on the temporal evolution of the discovered social groups using case studies.

     

Multi-relational reinforcement for computing credibility of nodes

Nowadays, growing number of social networks are available on the internet, with which users can conveniently make friends, share information, and exchange ideas with each other. As the result, large amount of data are generated from activities of those users. Such data are regarded as valuable resources to support different mining tasks, such as predicting friends for a user, ranking users in terms of their influence on the social network, or identifying communities with common interests. Traditional algorithms for those tasks are often designed under the assumption that a user selects another user as his friend based on their common interests. As a matter of fact, users on a social network may not always develop their friends with common interest. For example, a user may randomly select other users as his friends just in order to attract more links reversely from them. Therefore, such links may not indicate his influence. In this paper, we study the user rank problem in terms of their ‘real’ influences. For this sake, common interest relationships among users are established besides their friend relationships. Then, the credible trust link from one node to another is on account of their similarities, which means the more similar the two users, the more credible their trust relation. So the credibility of a node is high if its trust inlinks are credible enough. In this work, we propose a framework that computes the credibility of nodes on a multi-relational network using reinforcement techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to assess credibility exploited knowledge on multi-relational social networks. The experimental results on real data sets show that our framework is effective.     

Generating timeline summaries with social media attention

Timeline generation is an important research task which can help users to have a quick understanding of the overall evolution of one given topic. Previous methods simply split the time span into fixed, equal time intervals without studying the role of the evolutionary patterns of the underlying topic in timeline generation. In addition, few of these methods take users’ collective interests into considerations to generate timelines.We consider utilizing social media attention to address these two problems due to the facts: 1) social media is an important pool of real users’ collective interests; 2) the information cascades generated in it might be good indicators for boundaries of topic phases. Employing Twitter as a basis, we propose to incorporate topic phases and user’s collective interests which are learnt from social media into a unified timeline generation algorithm.We construct both one informativeness-oriented and three interestingness-oriented evaluation sets over five topics.We demonstrate that it is very effective to generate both informative and interesting timelines. In addition, our idea naturally leads to a novel presentation of timelines, i.e., phase based timelines, which can potentially improve user experience.     

An empirical study on user-topic rating based collaborative filtering methods

User based collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully applied into recommender system for years. The main idea of user based CF is to discover communities of users sharing similar interests, thus, in which, the measurement of user similarity is the foundation of CF. However, existing user based CF methods suffer from data sparsity, which means the user-item matrix is often too sparse to get ideal outcome in recommender systems. One possible way to alleviate this problem is to bring new data sources into user based CF. Thanks to the rapid development of social annotation systems, we turn to using tags as new sources. In these approaches, user-topic rating based CF is proposed to extract topics from tags using different topic model methods, based on which we compute the similarities between users by measuring their preferences on topics. In this paper, we conduct comparisons between three user-topic rating based CF methods, using PLSA, Hierarchical Clustering and LDA. All these three methods calculate user-topic preferences according to their ratings of items and topic weights. We conduct the experiments using the MovieLens dataset. The experimental results show that LDA based user-topic rating CF and Hierarchical Clustering outperforms the traditional user based CF in recommending accuracy, while the PLSA based user-topic rating CF performs worse than the traditional user based CF.     

In & out zooming on time-aware user/tag clusters

The common ground behind most approaches that analyze social tagging systems is addressing the information challenge that emerges from the massive activity of millions of users who interact and share resources and/or metadata online. However, lack of any time-related data in the analysis process implicitly denies much of the dynamic nature of social tagging activity. In this paper we claim that holding a temporal dimension, allows for tracking macroscopic and microscopic users’ interests, detecting emerging trends and recognizing events. To this end, we propose a time-aware co-clustering approach for acquiring semantic and temporal patterns out of the tagging activity. The resulted clusters contain both users and tags of similar patterns over time, and reveal non-obvious or “hidden” relations among users and topics of their common interest. Zoom in & out views serve as visualization methods on different aspects of the clusters’ structure, in order to evaluate the efficiency of the approach.     

Discovering Typed Communities in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social networks,which consist of mobile users who communicate with each other using cell phones,are reflections of people’s interactions in social lives.Discovering typed communities(e.g.,family communities or corporate communities) in mobile social networks is a very promising problem.For example,it can help mobile operators to determine the target users for precision marketing.In this paper we propose discovering typed communities in mobile social networks by utilizing the labels of relationships between users.We use the user logs stored by mobile operators,including communication and user movement records,to collectively label all the relationships in a network,by employing an undirected probabilistic graphical model,i.e.,conditional random fields.Then we use two methods to discover typed communities based on the results of relationship labeling:one is simply retaining or cutting relationships according to their labels,and the other is using sophisticated weighted community detection algorithms.The experimental results show that our proposed framework performs well in terms of the accuracy of typed community detection in mobile social networks.     

Community detection in social networks using user frequent pattern mining

Recently, social networking sites are offering a rich resource of heterogeneous data. The analysis of such data can lead to the discovery of unknown information and relations in these networks. The detection of communities including ‘similar’ nodes is a challenging topic in the analysis of social network data, and it has been widely studied in the social networking community in the context of underlying graph structure. Online social networks, in addition to having graph structures, include effective user information within networks. Using this information leads to enhance quality of community discovery. In this study, a method of community discovery is provided. Besides communication among nodes to improve the quality of the discovered communities, content information is used as well. This is a new approach based on frequent patterns and the actions of users on networks, particularly social networking sites where users carry out their preferred activities. The main contributions of proposed method are twofold: First, based on the interests and activities of users on networks, some small communities of similar users are discovered, and then by using social relations, the discovered communities are extended. The F-measure is used to evaluate the results of two real-world datasets (Blogcatalog and Flickr), demonstrating that the proposed method principals to improve the community detection quality.     

User interest mining via tags and bidirectional interactions on Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo, one of the biggest social services in China, provides users with opportunities to share information and express their personal views, leading an explosive growth of information. How to recommend the right information to the proper person among massive data has received considerable critical attention in recent years. One of the main obstacles is the access to user topic interests. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm based on tags and bidirectional interactions to mine user topic interests on Sina Weibo. The algorithm, formulated by user interaction graph, fully takes advantage of the discordance between user interactions. Forward spread and back spread are thus utilized to update tag spread weights. We also quantify the impact of these two spread by tuning parameters on three sub data sets. In order to prove the superiority of the algorithm, we compare our algorithm with famous methods on Sina Weibo. The result demonstrates that our new algorithm outperforms other methods both in precision rate and recall rate, with the ability of mining user interest effectively with respect to tags and bidirectional interactions.     

Sockpuppet gang detection on social media sites

Users of social media sites can use more than one account. These identities have pseudo anonymous properties, and as such some users abuse multiple accounts to perform undesirable actions, such as posting false or misleading remarks comments that praise or defame the work of others. The detection of multiple user accounts that are controlled by an individual or organization is important. Herein, we define the problem as sockpuppet gang (SPG) detection. First, we analyze user sentiment orientation to topics based on emotional phrases extracted from their posted comments. Then we evaluate the similarity between sentiment orientations of user account pairs, and build a similar-orientation network (SON) where each vertex represents a user account on a social media site. In an SON, an edge exists only if the two user accounts have similar sentiment orientations to most topics. The boundary between detected SPGs may be indistinct, thus by analyzing account posting behavior features we propose a multiple random walk method to iteratively remeasure the weight of each edge. Finally, we adopt multiple community detection algorithms to detect SPGs in the network. User accounts in the same SPG are considered to be controlled by the same individual or organization. In our experiments on real world datasets, our method shows better performance than other contemporary methods.     

基于P2P的个性化Web搜索系统的设计与实现

针对中心化的Web信息搜索系统在覆盖率、及时性、个性化、可扩展性等方面存在的问题,提出了一种基于Peer-to-Peer(P2P)的可扩展、个性化的Web搜索系统PeerBridge。PeerBridge基于分布式哈希表组织大量的网络结点形成有组织的P2P覆盖网络,每个对等体作为一个主题搜索引擎,根据用户兴趣从Web中搜索特定主题相关的信息,而具有相似主题的对等体被聚集在一起形成基于主题的对等体簇,协作进行Web搜索与信息共享。并采用主题驱动的Web爬行、基于语义概念的文档分类、个性化的链接分析和基于主题划分的P2P搜索等机制来改善PeerBridge的性能。     

在线社交网络中的新兴话题检测技术综述

新兴话题检测是社交网络研究的热点问题之一。在线社交网络特别是微博的开放性,给话题的流行和爆发提供了前所未有的便利条件。新兴话题是即将流行或爆发的话题,往往伴随着重大的事件或新闻的发生,会产生重大的社会影响,如何在早期识别此类话题,是新兴话题检测研究的主要内容。该文回顾了近年来在新兴话题检测方面的主要进展,分析了新兴话题检测领域面临的挑战,阐述了相关的概念、方法和理论,重点从内容突发特征和信息传播模型两个方面对影响新兴话题检测的方法进行了分析和讨论,并对新兴话题检测的前景做了展望。
     

QuestionHolic: Hot topic discovery and trend analysis in community question answering systems

Community question answering (CQA) has recently become a popular social media where users can post questions on any topic of interest and get answers from enthusiasts. The variation of topics in questions and answers indicate the change of users’ interests over time. It can help users focus on the most popular products or events and track their changes by exploiting hot topics and analyzing the trend of a specific topic. In this paper, we present a hot topic detection and trend analysis system to capture hot topics in a CQA system and track their evolutions over time. Our system consists of hot term extraction, question clustering and trend analysis. Experimental results using datasets from Yahoo! Answers show that our system can discover meaningful hot topics. We also show that the evolution of topics over time can be accurately exploited by trend graphing.     

基于用户邻域和主题的新颖性Web社区推荐方法

社区推荐从海量社区中为用户过滤出有价值的社区,变得越来越重要.新颖性推荐逐渐得到关注,因为单纯追求准确度的推荐结果存在局限性.已有新颖性推荐方法不适用于社区推荐,因其无法处理Web社区特性,包括社区成员用户通过交互形成的关系网络以及社区主题.提出了一种新颖性社区推荐方法NovelRec,向用户推荐其有潜在兴趣但不知道的社区,旨在拓展用户视野和推动社区发展.NovelRec基于用户交互网络中的邻域关系,利用用户之间在主题上的关联,计算候选社区对用户的准确度;根据用户与社区在邻域和主题上的关联,提出一种用户社区距离度量方式,并利用该距离计算候选社区的新颖度.在此基础上,NovelRec最终进行新颖性社区推荐,并兼顾推荐结果的准确性.真实数据集上的对比实验结果表明,NovelRec方法在新颖性上优于现有方法,同时能够保证推荐结果的准确性.     

Discerning individual interests and shared interests for social user profiling

Traditionally, research about social user profiling assumes that users share some similar interests with their followees. However, it lacks the studies on what topic and to what extent their interests are similar. Our study in online sharing sites reveals that besides shared interests between followers and followees, users do maintain some individual interests which differ from their followees. Thus, for better social user profiling we need to discern individual interests (capturing the uniqueness of users) and shared interests (capturing the commonality of neighboring users) of the users in the connected world. To achieve this, we extend the matrix factorization model by incorporating both individual and shared interests, and also learn the multi-faceted similarities unsupervisedly. The proposed method can be applied to many applications, such as rating prediction, item level social influence maximization and so on. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our work can be applied to improve the performance of social rating. Also, it can reveal some interesting findings, such as who likes the “controversial” items most, and who is the most influential in attracting their followers to rate an item.     

基于用户标注行为的潜在好友推荐

目前多数社交网络主要根据已有好友关系推荐潜在好友,用户的兴趣爱好不作为主要考虑因素;此外,如何从大量数据中精确地提取用户的兴趣爱好是一项十分艰巨的任务。为此,提出一种在大量标注行为数据中精确挖掘出用户的兴趣爱好,并据此推荐具有相同兴趣爱好的潜在好友的算法--基于标注的好友推荐(FRBT)算法。首先使用词频-逆向文件频率(TF-IDF)对标签进行聚类,将语义相似的标签聚成话题;然后在话题的基础上提出一种新的相似度公式来计算用户相似度;再融合基于话题与基于物品的用户相似度,将相似度较高的用户作为潜在好友进行推荐。在Delicious数据集上以准确率和召回率为指标与item、tag和tri-graph三种算法进行比较,实验验证了该算法能够更准确地为用户推荐兴趣相似的好友。     

A probabilistic method for emerging topic tracking in Microblog stream

Microblog is a popular and open platform for discovering and sharing the latest news about social issues and daily life. The quickly-updated microblog streams make it urgent to develop an effective tool to monitor such streams. Emerging topic tracking is one of such tools to reveal what new events are attracting the most online attention at present. However, due to the fast changing, high noise and short length of the microblog feeds, two challenges should be addressed in emerging topic tracking. One is the problem of detecting emerging topics early, long before they become hot, and the other is how to effectively monitor evolving topics over time. In this study, we propose a novel emerging topics tracking method, which aligns emerging word detection from temporal perspective with coherent topic mining from spatial perspective. Specifically, we first design a metric to estimate word novelty and fading based on local weighted linear regression (LWLR), which can highlight the word novelty of expressing an emerging topic and suppress the word novelty of expressing an existing topic. We then track emerging topics by leveraging topic novelty and fading probabilities, which are learnt by designing and solving an optimization problem. We evaluate our method on a microblog stream containing over one million feeds. Experimental results show the promising performance of the proposed method in detecting emerging topic and tracking topic evolution over time on both effectiveness and efficiency.