Social Network Analysis

What is Twitter

With the advent of Web 2.0, people became more eager to express and share their opinions on web regarding day-to-day activities and global issues as well. Evolution of social media has also contributed immensely to these activities, thereby providing us a transparent platform to share views across the world. These electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) statements expressed on the web are much prevalent in business and service industry to enable customer to share his/her point of view. In the last one and half decades, research communities, academia, public and service industries are working rigorously on sentiment analysis, also known as, opinion mining, to extract and analyze public mood and views. In this regard, this paper presents a rigorous survey on sentiment analysis, which portrays views presented by over one hundred articles published in the last decade regarding necessary tasks, approaches, and applications of sentiment analysis. Several sub-tasks need to be performed for sentiment analysis which in turn can be accomplished using various approaches and techniques. This survey covering published literature during 2002-2015, is organized on the basis of sub-tasks to be performed, machine learning and natural language processing techniques used and applications of sentiment analysis. The paper also presents open issues and along with a summary table of a hundred and sixty-one articles.

A survey on opinion mining and sentiment analysis

As the rapid growth of social media technologies continues, Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) has been a hot topic in many industrial applications. The use of “microblogging” services, such as Twitter, has rapidly become an influential way to share information. While recent studies have revealed that understanding and modelling microblog user behaviour with massive users’ data in social media are keen to success of many practical applications in CPSS, a key challenge in literatures is that diversity of geography and cultures in social media technologies strongly affect user behaviour and activity. The motivation of this article is to understand differences and similarities between microblogging users from different countries using social media technologies, and to attempt to design a Country-Level Micro-Blog User (CLMB) behaviour and activity model for supporting CPSS applications. We proposed a CLMB model for analysing microblogging user behaviour and their activity across different countries in the CPSS applications. The model has considered three important characteristics of user behaviour in microblogging data, including content of microblogging messages, user emotion index, and user relationship network. We evaluated CLBM model under the collected microblog dataset from 16 countries with the largest number of representative and active users in the world. Experimental results show that (1) for some countries with small population and strong cohesiveness, users pay more attention to social functionalities of microblogging service; (2) for some countries containing mostly large loose social groups, users use microblogging services as a news dissemination platform; (3) users in countries whose social network structure exhibits reciprocity rather than hierarchy will use more linguistic elements to express happiness in microblogging services.

Comparison and Modelling of Country-level Microblog User and Activity in Cyber-physical-social Systems Using Weibo and Twitter Data

Purpose – Since its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research.Design/methodology/approach – Firstly the papers on Twitter were identified. Secondly, following a review of the literature, a classification of the dimensions of microblogging research was established. Thirdly, papers were qualitatively classified using open coded content analysis, based on the paper's title and abstract, in order to analyze method, subject, and approach.Findings – The majority of published work relating to Twitter concentrates on aspects of the messages sent and details of the users. A variety of methodological approaches is used across a range of identified domains.Research limitations/implications – This work reviewed the abstracts of all papers available via database search...

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What do people study when they study Twitter? Classifying Twitter related academic papers

Nowadays, it is a heated topic for many industries to build automatic question-answering (QA) systems. A key solution to these QA systems is to retrieve from a QA knowledge base the most similar question of a given question, which can be reformulated as a paraphrase identification (PI) or a natural language inference (NLI) problem. However, most existing models for PI and NLI have at least two problems: They rely on a large amount of labeled data, which is not always available in real scenarios, and they may not be efficient for industrial applications. In this paper, we study transfer learning for the PI and NLI problems, aiming to propose a general framework, which can effectively and efficiently adapt the shared knowledge learned from a resource-rich source domain to a resource-poor target domain. Specifically, since most existing transfer learning methods only focus on learning a shared feature space across domains while ignoring the relationship between the source and target domains, we propose to simultaneously learn shared representations and domain relationships in a unified framework. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and effective hybrid model by combining a sentence encoding-based method and a sentence interaction-based method as our base model. Extensive experiments on both paraphrase identification and natural language inference demonstrate that our base model is efficient and has promising performance compared to the competing models, and our transfer learning method can help to significantly boost the performance. Further analysis shows that the inter-domain and intra-domain relationship captured by our model are insightful. Last but not least, we deploy our transfer learning model for PI into our online chatbot system, which can bring in significant improvements over our existing system. Finally, we launch our new system on the chatbot platform Eva in our E-commerce site AliExpress.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4966&context=sis_research

Modelling Domain Relationships for Transfer Learning on Retrieval-based Question Answering Systems in E-commerce

Micro-blogging is becoming an increasingly popular social media platform where users can discover interesting information about the real world and especially corporations are able to understand customers' demands. The fast diffusion of information and the convenience of micro-blogging have resulted in large audiences sharing their daily activities, exchanging opinions and establishing friendships with others. By analyzing the user-generated contents, one can explore users' potential interests, which helps micro-blogging provide users with better personalized information services. Users' behaviors are affected by opinions of their friends and changes in their interests over time. Based on these intuitions, in this paper we propose a temporal and social probabilistic matrix factorization model to predict users' potential interests in micro-blogging. By exploiting the matrix factorization technique to learn latent features of users and topics, our model analyzes the impacts of time information and users' activities, including posting of tweets and establishing friendships with others, on the latent feature space of users and topics of their interests. The proposed model provides a unified way to fuse the time information and the social network structure to predict users' future interests accurately. The experimental results on Sina-weibo, one of the most popular micro-blogging sites in China, demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed model. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A new temporal and social PMF-based method to predict users' interests in micro-blogging

Due to its brief form and growing popularity, microblogging is becoming people’s favorite choice for seeking information and expressing opinions. Messages received by a user mainly depend on whom the user follows. Thus, recommending users with similar interests may improve the experience quality for information receiving. Since messages posted by microblogging users reflect their interests, and the keywords in the messages indicate their main focus to a large extent, we can discover users’ preferences by analyzing the user-generated contents. Moreover, users’ interests are not static, on the contrary, they change as time goes by. Based on such intuitions, in this paper, we propose a temporal-topic model to analyze users’ possible behaviors and predict their potential friends in microblogging. The model learns users’ latent preferences by extracting keywords on aggregated messages over a period of time via a topic model, and then the impact of time is considered to deal with interest drifts. The experimental results of friend recommendations on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging sites in China, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

A Temporal-Topic Model for Friend Recommendations in Chinese Microblogging Systems

With the rapid development of Web 2.0, micro-blogging such as twitter is increasingly becoming an important source of up-to-date topics about what is happening in the world. By analyzing topic trends sequences and identifying relations among topics we have opportunities to gain insights into topic associations and thereby provide better services for micro-bloggers. This paper proposes a novel framework that mines the associations among topic trends in twitter by considering both temporal and location information. The framework consists of the extraction of topics' spatio-temporal information and the calculation of the similarity among topics. The experimental results show that our method can find the related topics effectively and accurately.

A spatio-temporal framework for related topic search in micro-blogging

In this paper, we propose a Concept-level Emotion Cause Model (CECM), instead of the mere word-level models, to discover causes of microblogging users' diversified emotions on specific hot event. A modified topic-supervised biterm topic model is utilized in CECM to detect "emotion topics" in event-related tweets, and then context-sensitive topical PageRank is utilized to detect meaningful multiword expressions as emotion causes. Experimental results on a dataset from Sina Weibo, one of the largest microblogging websites in China, show CECM can better detect emotion causes than baseline methods.

Shuangyong Song

Papers

Modelling Domain Relationships for Transfer Learning on Retrieval-based Question Answering Systems in E-commerce

A new temporal and social PMF-based method to predict users' interests in micro-blogging

A Temporal-Topic Model for Friend Recommendations in Chinese Microblogging Systems

A spatio-temporal framework for related topic search in micro-blogging

Detecting Concept-level Emotion Cause in Microblogging