Papers by Munmun De Choudhury
ACM Sigweb Newsletter, 2012
This article presents an overview of the dissertation work entitled &... more This article presents an overview of the dissertation work entitled "Analyzing the Dynamics of Communication in Online Social Networks", by Munmun De Choudhury. It was completed in 2011 at the Arizona State University, Tempe, under the supervision of Prof. Hari Sundaram. The dissertation deals with the analysis of interpersonal communication dynamics in online social networks and social media. Communication dynamics
Computing Research Repository, 2010
This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffu... more This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffusion in online social media. Over several decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that similarity breeds connection: precisely known as "homophily". Homophily has been extensively studied in the social sciences and refers to the idea that users in a social system tend to bond more with ones who are similar to them than to ones who are dissimilar. The key observation is that homophily structures the ego-networks of individuals and impacts their communication behavior. It is therefore likely to effect the mechanisms in which information propagates among them. To this effect, we investigate the interplay between homophily along diverse user attributes and the information diffusion process on social media. In our approach, we first extract diffusion characteristics---corresponding to the baseline social graph as well as graphs filtered on different user attributes (e.g. location, activity). Second, we propose a Dynamic Bayesian Network based framework to predict diffusion characteristics at a future time. Third, the impact of attribute homophily is quantified by the ability of the predicted characteristics in explaining actual diffusion, and external variables, including trends in search and news. Experimental results on a large Twitter dataset demonstrate that choice of the homophilous attribute can impact the prediction of information diffusion, given a specific metric and a topic. In most cases, attribute homophily is able to explain the actual diffusion and external trends by ~15-25% over cases when homophily is not considered.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2010
This article analyzes communication within a set of individuals to extract the representative pro... more This article analyzes communication within a set of individuals to extract the representative prototypical groups and provides a novel framework to establish the utility of such groups. Corporations may want to identify representative groups (which are indicative of the overall communication set) because it is easier to track the prototypical groups rather than the entire set. This can be useful
We have developed a computational framework to characterize social network dynamics in the blogos... more We have developed a computational framework to characterize social network dynamics in the blogosphere at individual, group and community levels. The framework is important in addressing problems related to targeted advertizing and understanding network resource usage patterns. Secondly, we also show how to determine the utility of the mined knowledge, by correlating it with an external time series (the stock market). Our framework is comprised of three steps. First, we model features at an individual level along different dimensions as activity characteristics, communication influence, spatial graph properties. These features are used to extract groups and their evolution. Second, we model features at a group level using assortativity, characteristic path length and aggregate individual characteristics at the group-level. These group features are used to extract group-types (unsupervised clusters). Third, we characterize communities using several activity based and temporal measures: temporal density (to capture consistency), conductance, coverage (to capture cohesiveness), group-type entropy and size entropy. To test our model, we have analyzed postings on the consumer electronics web magazine, Engadget ( www.engadget.com ) related to four topics (Apple, Nokia, Microsoft and Google). Our results show that the community macro characteristics are indicators of different event types (positive / negative). We establish the utility of the extracted groups, by showing that they predict the stock market movement well (89%) and removal of important groups reduces predictability by 26% on the average.
Abstract We have developed a computational framework to characterize social network dynamics in t... more Abstract We have developed a computational framework to characterize social network dynamics in the blogosphere at individual, group and community levels. Such characterization could be used by corporations to help drive targeted advertising and to track the moods and sentiments of consumers. We tested our model on a widely read technology blog called Engadget. Our results show that communities transit between states of high and low entropy, depending on sentiments (positive/negative) about external ...
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2012
To cope with the continuing growth of the web, improvements should be made to the current brute-f... more To cope with the continuing growth of the web, improvements should be made to the current brute-force techniques commonly used by robot-driven search engines. We propose a model that strikes a balance between robot and directory- based search engines by expanding the search scope of conventional directories to automatically include related categories. Our model makes use of a knowledge-rich and well- structured corpus to infer relationships between documents and topic categories. We show that the hyperlink structure ofWikipedia articles can be effectively exploited to identify relations among topic categories. Our experiments show the average recall rate and precision rate achieved are 91% and between 85% and 215% of Google's respectively.
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Papers by Munmun De Choudhury