Social Media Research Blog

Structure of Information Pathways in Social Networks

One of the papers I am looking forward to at KDD 2008 is "The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network"  by Kossinets, Kleinberg and Watts (PDF). This paper analyzes the communication graph of an email network. The authors present two important and novel concepts to social networks research: Temporal distance and Network backbone. They beautifully incorporate a rather Operating Systems textbook technique of vector clocks into the analysis of social networks. Following is an excerpt from the abstract:

....We formulate a temporal notion of “distance” in the underlying social network by measuring the minimum time required for information to spread from one node to another — a concept that draws on the notion of vector-clocks from the study of distributed computing systems. We find that such temporal measures provide structural insights that are not apparent from analyses of the pure social network topology. In particular, we define the network backbone to be the subgraph consisting of edges on which information has the potential to flow the quickest. We find that the backbone is a sparse graph with a concentration of both highly embedded edges and long-range bridges—a finding that sheds new light on the relationship between tie strength and connectivity in social networks.

The authors use vector clocks to determine the nodes that are up-to date with respect to each other and describe a network backbone as

the subset of edges in the social network that are not bypassed by a faster alternate path.

Thus a network backbone is the set of edges that are critical in ensuring the flow of information within the network and thereby responsible for keeping the nodes 'in sync' with respect to each other. The idea of a backbone is not new and many real world networks like the internet are known to have some such equivalent. Traditionally, in social networks most of the attention so far has been on the "strength of weak links".  In this paper, the authors not only validate this phenomena, but also show that these links are critical in the network backbone structure. This is a paper that offers some deep insights and fundamentally advances our knowledge of how information flows in social networks.

DERI/NUI boards.ie SIOC Data Competition

Following Announcement is Via Dr. John Breslin spotted on W3C's Semantic Web Mailing List:

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with
boards.ie, Ireland’s largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on an RDF data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years:

* The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500)
* The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250)
* The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)

Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at:

http://data.sioc-project.org/

The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) RDF format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!

This event is duly noted in the Social Media Events Calendar.

M3SN Workshop on Social Media

Just wanted to share a quick pointer to the First International Workshop on Modeling, Mining and Managing Evolving Social Networks (M3SN) to be co-located with IEEE ICDE 2009 in Shanghai. Following is the CFP via Christian König

M3SN Workshop on Social Media - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: M3SN Workshop on Social Media

SSM 2008 Deadline Extended

The organizers of CIKM 2008 Workshop on Search in Social Media have extended their paper submission deadline from July 20, 2008 to July 27, 2008. For more information please visit the homepage of the workshop. Below is an excerpt from the CFP:

  Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. Social media are a fascinating phenomenon because they establish new forums for content creation, allow people to connect to each other and share information, and permit novel applications at the intersection of people and information. However, whereas in the general web search is a critical application that drives usability, social media has been primarily popular for connecting people, not for finding information. While there has been progress on searching particular kinds of social media, such as blogs, search in others (facebook/myspace/flickr) are not as well understood. The purpose of this workshop is to focus the attention of the research community on this emerging topic, and to bring together information retrieval and social media researchers to consider the following questions: How should we search in social media? What are the needs of users, and models of those needs, specific to social media search? What models make the most sense? How does search interact with existing uses of social media? What works and what doesn't?

This workshop is chaired by

• Ian Soboroff, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
• Ravi Kumar, Yahoo! Research

Note that the event has been updated in the Social Media Calendar as well. To keep track of social media research conferences and venues please subscribe via the calendar.

Social Media Events (Google Calendar)

As I had promised before, I plan to maintain a calendar of social media events. You can subscribe to the calendar here:

http://tinyurl.com/46s6e8

I will be on the lookout for events, conferences, workshops and talks that might be of interest to the community. I will try to balance both academic and business/networking event opportunities -- although the primary focus would be research conferences. Please forward me relevant postings and announcements at akshayjava on Gmail. Looking forward to meeting you at the next conference/venue!

BTW, Here is a nice layout of the events using this cool Yahoo Pipe by Tony Hirst: (aaargh! Typepad! you are killing me with this new editor -- the map shows up in the preview but not on my post -- huh!)

Social Media Conferences and Workshops

ICWSM was a great hit! And now there are a growing number of conferences (WWW 08 social networks and Web 2.0)  and workshops (DEBSM) for social media research. This is fantastic for the community as a whole: as more people are excited about working in this area, we can bet there will be some significant advances in research and improve our understanding of online communities and social media content. What I particularly love is the fact that Social Media research is an exciting interplay of computer science, social science, psychology and other related fields.

I decided to maintain a list of upcoming conference deadlines and venues for social media research. With a little help from the community, I will try and keep this list up-to-date and accurate. Here is an initial list of upcoming venues for the next few months, while I gather and organize all the deadlines in Google Calendar or something.

• The First International Workshop on Data Semantics in Social Computing
  Systems (DiSCo `08) [http://www.deg.byu.edu/ding/workshop/disco08.html]
• International Workshop on Computational Social Networks (IWCSN 2008)
  http://www.softcomputing.net/~csn/
• The First Workshop on Information Retrieval for Advertising
  Collocated with SIGIR 2008
  http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/ira2008/
• AND08: Second Workshop on Analytics for Noisy
  Unstructured Text Data http://and2008workshop.googlepages.com/
• Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked
  Sensing Systems http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/urbansensing/
• Search in Social Media (SSM 2008)
  A workshop held in conjunction with CIKM 2008
  http://ir.mathcs.emory.edu/SSM2008/
• Wikis, Blogs, Bookmarking Tools - Mining the Web 2.0 (WBBTMine'08)
  http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/ws/wbbtmine2008/
• The 2nd International Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis (SNAKDD 2008)
   http://workshops.socialnetworkanalysis.info/SNAKDD2008/
• [Update] Special Session on Mining of Social Media @ SAMT 2008 http://samt2008.uni-koblenz.de/index.php?page=calls_papers

Please comment below or email me if you know of any other venues and I shall make sure to add them to this list. Hope to see you at the next conference/workshop!

SocialDevCamp Trip Report

SocialDevCamp totally rokced! The event was best described as:

SocialDevCamp East is the Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web

Where is the social web going? It's going mobile, to geocentric services, and to open platforms. Join a community of like minded developers, social media gurus and thought leaders for an unconference to discuss the future of the social web.

Here is my trip report from this event:

1. Innovation in Social Media if being fueled by brilliant people who are running some really successful startups.
2. The "Amtrak Corridor" has a ton of talent. There were some really amazing people I met at this event -- some who came down from NY, Philadelphia and even Boston. There was a strong sense of community and entrepreneurial brotherhood, if you will.
3. The startup scene on the East coast is quite different from that on the West. There is very little VC funding here since most VCs in this area are super conservative. In fact from the audience members who attended the "Who Needs VCs" session perhaps only two companies had taken funding.
4. Location! Location! Location! Dave Troy gave a great talk on geolocation and his vision for the openlocation initiative. I think we will see a number of startups in this space and it will be exciting to see how devices like iPhone and others change how we find location relevant information.
5. "Semantic Web" is no longer just a vision. The session "Social Media and Semantic Web" proposed and presented by our very own eBiquity alum Dr. Harry Chen was one of the most attended session. It says something BIG is about to happen when a bunch of really smart entrepreneurs are interested in Semantic Web. Bear from Seesmic shared his thoughts and talked about how they were using Semantic Web technologies.
6. Amazon EC2 and S3 offer a fantastic alternative to startups. It is the best way to scale up your product and the benefits of using EC2 outweigh the costs. 
7. Twitter is the new business card. I have said this before, business cards are a very short lifespan. SocialDevCampers instead preferred to exchange their twitter handles and add folks by checking the #socialdevcamp interest on twitter. And I think we my have finally convinced Harry about the utility of Twitter!
8. Twitter was the best backchannel at the conference. In all the sessions, we talked about some great sites and shared resources we all knew collectively. The Twitter streams recorded all the highlights of each session for posterity. Even if you did not attend a session now you know a few things that were discussed there.
9. Lots of iPhones. Photos, Videos, Twitter messages were flying everywhere. There was even a session on the iPhone development (unfortunately I missed that one; it was tough deciding which session to attend when all seemed so good).
10. Techies know how to party hard! Thanks to the After Party sponsors, geektalk ruled at the local bar Brewers Art. This is a fantastic local microbrewery that serves 7% 10% alcohol beers. :-) Beer+ Free Food + Techies = one hell of a party!

Those who did not make it really missed out on a great event. But fret no more. Soon there will be an announcement for the SocialDevCamp being held in the Fall -- no excuses that time!

A special thanks to the organizers and sponsors for supporting this event and bringing us all together. (Blogs covering this event)

SocialDevCamp East: Local BarCamp Event in Baltimore

I am excited about the local BarCamp event organized by David Troy of Twittervision and Ann Bernard, Keith Casey from WhyGoSolo. It looks like a fun event and a great "UnConference" for local entrepreneurs, social media enthusiasts and researchers to get together and talk about the future, innovation of Social Media and the Web.

It promises to be an event that would

bring together forward thinkers – developers, social media gurus, bizdev types – to discuss and Chart the Next Course.

The Agenda and signup details are available on the PBWiki site. Some of the proposed session topics (From the Wiki):

• Mobile Application Development with iPhone & Android
• What are the implications of Geo-based web applications?
• How will Agile Development practices affect ideation and funding processes?
• Platforms Present & Future
• What will matter on the web a year or two from now?
• Where will information aggregation take us?
• Social Media is here to stay – so where will it go next?
• How will Google keep affecting development, the web and our lives?
• What are the next things web users will want from the web?
• What will be the impact of future generations to the current web we know today?
• Social Media in the workplace vs. in life
• How the Web is being broken apart into pieces - Justin Thorp

Fantastic! Cant wait to be there!

There are also some sponsorship opportunities (starting @ $250) available for this event. Also please note that there is no cost for participants (which is great for grad students like me!). :-D

For more details please contact Dave Troy or come and chat with us on Facebook.

Notes from DEBSM Workshop: Using SentiWordNet for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Using SentiWordNet for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis
Kerstin Denecke

Subjectivity Analysis is about identifying a set of opinions emotions and thoughts that are expressed in text. As opposed to factual statements (objective text), the goal is to identify if there are any:

• sentiment or emotions expressed in a piece of text
• type of subjectivity can be either positive/negative opinions

The question addressed in this paper is how to analyze subjectivity and sentiments in in multilingual datasets. This was a really well motivated paper and a it was great to hear this talk especially after attending the recent tutorial by Dr. Jan Weibe at ICWSM. One motivation is that a company that sells products in many different countries might want to know the sentiments of its clients. A big difficulty in aggregating across different geographies is analyzing multilingual text.

Some of the difficulties in dealing with multilingual sentiment analysis are:

• missing language specific lexical resources
• missing linguistic resources (POS Tagger, Parser)
• missing training materials

The solution proposed by Kerstin in this paper is to rely on resources available in English and use existing training sets (from English text) to identify the subjectivity in foreign language text. This is such a simple and effective idea that my first reaction was that of surprise! I am amazed that someone had not proposed it yet!

Kerstin's approach is to take the documents and translate them to English and sentiment analysis is applied on the translated version of the document to determine the polarity. One key technology being used in this work is SentiWordNet. It is a lexical resource for opinion mining that was manually created. It offers a triple of polarity scores for each wordnet synset (pos, neg, objectivity). This is an amazing resource for anyone working on Sentiment analysis. I was unaware of SentiWordNet when we were working on the TREC Blog track 2006. In retrospect, I wish I knew of it back then.

Working with the translated text, this paper identifies each word+POS and does a lookup in sentiword to obtain the scores per synset. Next, they calculate the score for each word class (adj,noun, verbs) for a given document. Finally, the score triples are averaged across the words in the sentences. The document is given a polarity score using the triples across all the sentences.

To identify the polarity there were two approaches that were used:

• Use a rule based approach by thresholding
• Use Machine Learning (WEKA) to train a logistic regression classifier.

Evaluation was done by using IMDB archive (1000 pos,neg reviews in English) and the testset was  MPQA (English) and Amazon movie reviews (German).

Some sources of errors mentioned in the presentation:

• Statistical translation errors
• "writing errors", which I think means slang usage (scaaaaade = what a pity or aaaawful)
• The system does not consider negated structures (not bad)
• mising resolution abiguities 14 synset for "bad"

Their results indicate that ML based approach is better and obtains an accuracy of around .65.

Notes from DEBSM Workshop: Monitoring the Evolution of Interest in Blogosphere

Monitoring the evolution of interests in the blogosphere
Iraklis Varlamis (Presenter), Vasilis Vassalos, Antonis Palaios

The authors present a simple (perhaps even obvious) hypothesis that "Interests of bloggers converge around real world events".

A prototype system was built to to analyze blogs and monitor the evolution of interests. Existing search engines monitor the term popularity of words in isolation and the related terms are not clustered in any way to identify the topics. A motivating example presented was around the football world cup season, where there might be terms like "football" "round" "final" "result" "world cup" and aggregated scores for topic would be helpful rather than having to find/view the histograms for each of these terms. Also one can not know all the terms for a given topic. In many cases, multilingual content and difference in vocabulary can further make it difficult to just monitor the term popularity. Other approaches require training a topic based on a given set of training/pre-annotated document pool. This is an expensive and a semi-supervised method can be strongly effected by the selection of the initial document pool.

The goal of their paper is to build an unsupervised approach to cluster the documents and identify the evolution of interest. However, the current algorithm presented is not incremental; but they claim some recent work on an incremental version. The current version of their algorithm uses the DBScan clustering technique. Term space is clustered at the post level and their evaluation is done using inter cluster, intra cluster similarity and the utility function. They have used the BuzzMetrics dataset, however they only focus on blogs that have a post everyday, which brings the dataset down to 2500 blogs. The posts are classified into topics and then the blogs are clustered. The categories are determined by using the Cyberfiber news groups to find the topics and training documents. This is an interesting dataset that I was not aware of.

Some questions that came up were the choice of using newswire documents to learn classifiers, and also the accuracy of the classifiers. While the original hypothesis seems obvious, it can be seen as a litmus test for the efficacy of the clustering algorithms. In particular the examples presented were using the "London Bombing" Event. Any clustering algorithm that groups the related terms must at the very least pass the litmus test to show that it works.

I think that in general there are perhaps two types of events, one concerning a very specific group of individuals  ("County elections", social events, conferences etc) where online communities emerge due to offline events. The other is around real word events like "London bombings" or "Hurricane Katrina": both of which are examples of events that cut across community boundaries and which invoke reaction from almost every part of the blogosphere and almost in unison. In such cases on might see that the original community affiliation of the bloggers dont matter and tech, politics, religion and every other community might be talking about the same issue.