In this paper, we provide a review on both fundamentals of social networks and latent space modeling. The former discusses important topics related to network description, including vertex characteristics and network structure; whereas the latter articulates relevant advances in network modeling, including random graph models, generalized random graph models, exponential random graph models, and social space models. We discuss in detail several latent space models provided in literature, providing special attention to distance, class, and eigen models in the context of undirected, binary networks. In addition, we also examine empirically the behavior of these models in terms of prediction and goodness-of-fit using more than twenty popular datasets of the network literature.
Social influence, sometimes referred to as spillover or contagion, have been extensively studied in various empirical social network research. However, there are various estimation challenges in identifying social influence effects, as they are often entangled with other factors, such as homophily in the selection process, the individual's preference for the same social settings, etc. Methods currently available either do not solve these problems or require strong assumptions. Recent works by Xu 2018 and others show that a latent-space adjusted approach based on the latent space model has pote…
Graph representation learning has become a prominent tool for the characterization and understanding of the structure of networks in general and social networks in particular. Typically, these representation learning approaches embed the networks into a low-dimensional space in which the role of each individual can be characterized in terms of their latent position. A major current concern in social networks is the emergence of polarization and filter bubbles promoting a mindset of "us-versus-them" that may be defined by extreme positions believed to ultimately lead to political violence and t…
Privacy scoring aims at measuring the privacy violation risk of a user over an online social network (OSN). Existing work in the field rely on possibly biased or emotional survey data and focus only on personel purpose OSNs like Facebook. In contrast to existing work, in this thesis, we work with real-world OSN data collected from LinkedIn, the most popular professional-purpose OSN (ProOSN). Towards this end, we developed an extensive crawler to collect all relevant profile data of 5,389 LinkedIn users, modelled these data using both relational and graph databases and quantitatively analyzed a…
The conventional way of summarizing ratings or sentiment of reviews of customers on products of an online shopping brand are not sufficient to evaluate the financial health of that brand. It overlooks the social standing and influence of individual customers. In this paper, we have proposed a tool named as Review Network for measuring the influence of customers in online merchandise sites like Amazon.com. Using this measured influence, we have proposed a method that evaluates loyalty of customers of a brand based on their ratings and sentiments of their reviews collected from online merchandis…
Automated representation learning is behind many recent success stories in machine learning. It is often used to transfer knowledge learned from a large dataset (e.g., raw text) to tasks for which only a small number of training examples are available. In this paper, we review recent advance in learning to represent social media users in low-dimensional embeddings. The technology is critical for creating high performance social media-based human traits and behavior models since the ground truth for assessing latent human traits and behavior is often expensive to acquire at a large scale. In th…
With the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, social media has rapidly become a crucial communication tool for information generation, dissemination, and consumption. In this scoping review, we selected and examined peer-reviewed empirical studies relating to COVID-19 and social media during the first outbreak starting in November 2019 until May 2020. From an analysis of 81 studies, we identified five overarching public health themes concerning the role of online social platforms and COVID-19. These themes focused on: (i) surveying public attitudes, (ii) identifying infodemics, (iii) assessing mental h…
Social bots represent a new generation of bots that make use of online social networks (OSNs) as a command and control (C\&C) channel. Malicious social bots were responsible for launching large-scale spam campaigns, promoting low-cap stocks, manipulating user's digital influence and conducting political astroturf. This paper presents a detailed review on current social bots and proper techniques that can be used to fly under the radar of OSNs defences to be undetectable for long periods of time. We also suggest a refined taxonomy of detection approaches from social network perspective, as well…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Modern social platforms are characterized by the presence of rich user-behavior data associated with the publication, sharing and consumption of textual content. Users interact with content and with each other in a complex and dynamic social environment while simultaneously evolving over time. In order to effectively characterize users and predict their future behavior in such a setting, it is necessary to overcome several challenges. Content heterogeneity and temporal inconsistency of behavior data result in severe sparsity at the user level. In this paper, we propose a novel mutual-enhanceme…
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Scalable Computing and Systems, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系可扩展计算与系统上海市重点实验室）；WeChat, Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司微信）；UM-SJTU Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学密西根大学联合学院）
Social recommendation leverages social information to solve data sparsity and cold-start problems in traditional collaborative filtering methods. However, most existing models assume that social effects from friend users are static and under the forms of constant weights or fixed constraints. To relax this strong assumption, in this paper, we propose dual graph attention networks to collaboratively learn representations for two-fold social effects, where one is modeled by a user-specific attention weight and the other is modeled by a dynamic and context-aware attention weight. We also extend t…
Social influence plays a vital role in shaping a user's behavior in online communities dealing with items of fine taste like movies, food, and beer. For online recommendation, this implies that users' preferences and ratings are influenced due to other individuals. Given only time-stamped reviews of users, can we find out who-influences-whom, and characteristics of the underlying influence network? Can we use this network to improve recommendation? While prior works in social-aware recommendation have leveraged social interaction by considering the observed social network of users, many commun…
The prediction for information diffusion on social networks has great practical significance in marketing and public opinion control. It aims to predict the individuals who will potentially repost the message on the social network. One type of method is based on demographics, complex networks and other prior knowledge to establish an interpretable model to simulate and predict the propagation process, while the other type of method is completely data-driven and maps the nodes to a latent space for propagation prediction. Existing latent space design and embedding methods lack consideration for…
Neural networks are increasingly used for graph classification in a variety of contexts. Social media is a critical application area in this space, however the characteristics of social media graphs differ from those seen in most popular benchmark datasets. Social networks tend to be large and sparse, while benchmarks are small and dense. Classically, large and sparse networks are analyzed by studying the distribution of local properties. Inspired by this, we introduce Graph-Hist: an end-to-end architecture that extracts a graph's latent local features, bins nodes together along 1-D cross sect…
In recent years, social networks have shown diversity in function and applications. People begin to use multiple online social networks simultaneously for different demands. The ability to uncover a user's latent topic and social network preference is critical for community detection, recommendation, and personalized service across social networks. Unfortunately, most current works focus on the single network, necessitating new technology and models to address this issue. This paper proposes a user preference discovery model on multiple social networks. Firstly, the global and local topic conc…
Social network data are often constructed by incorporating reports from multiple individuals. However, it is not obvious how to reconcile discordant responses from individuals. There may be particular risks with multiply-reported data if people's responses reflect normative expectations -- such as an expectation of balanced, reciprocal relationships. Here, we propose a probabilistic model that incorporates ties reported by multiple individuals to estimate the unobserved network structure. In addition to estimating a parameter for each reporter that is related to their tendency of over- or unde…
Mila-Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
We consider the problem of estimating social influence, the effect that a person's behavior has on the future behavior of their peers. The key challenge is that shared behavior between friends could be equally explained by influence or by two other confounding factors: 1) latent traits that caused people to both become friends and engage in the behavior, and 2) latent preferences for the behavior. This paper addresses the challenges of estimating social influence with three contributions. First, we formalize social influence as a causal effect, one which requires inferences about hypothetical …
Do people trust social media? If so, why, in what contexts, and how does that trust impact their lives? Researchers, companies, and journalists alike have increasingly investigated these questions, which are fundamental to understanding social media interactions and their implications for society. However, trust in social media is a complex concept, and there is conflicting evidence about the antecedents and implications of trusting social media content, users, and platforms. More problematic is that we lack basic agreement as to what trust means in the context of social media. Addressing thes…
Social media has changed the landscape of marketing and consumer research as the adoption and promotion of businesses is becoming more and more dependent on how the customers are interacting and feeling about the business on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp etc. Social review websites like Yelp have become an important source of information about different businesses. Social influence on these online platforms can result in individuals adopting or promoting ideas and actions resulting in information cascades. Research on information cascades have been gaining popularity over the last few…
What are People Talking about in #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate? Exploring and Categorizing Twitter Topics Emerging in Online Social Movements through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model
Duke Kunshan University（杜克-昆山大学）；Data Science Research Center（数据科学研究中心）；Social Science Division Duke Kunshan University（社会科学系杜克-昆山大学）
This paper presents an analysis of social experiences around wine consumption through the lens of Vivino, a social network for wine enthusiasts with over 26 million users worldwide. We compare users' perceptions of various wine types and regional styles across both New and Old World wines, examining them across price ranges, vintages, regions, varietals, and blends. Among other things, we find that ratings provided by Vivino users are not biased by cost. We then study how wine characteristics, language in wine reviews, and the distribution of wine ratings can be combined to develop prediction …
As an emerging interaction paradigm, physiological computing is increasingly being used to both measure and feed back information about our internal psychophysiological states. While most applications of physiological computing are designed for individual use, recent research has explored how biofeedback can be socially shared between multiple users to augment human-human communication. Reflecting on the empirical progress in this area of study, this paper presents a systematic review of 64 studies to characterize the interaction contexts and effects of social biofeedback systems. Our findings…
Dedan Kimathi University of Technology（德丹·基马蒂科技大学）
In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and reviews, are very useful for big businesses, markets, politics, journalism, and many other fields. Politics is one of the most talked-about and popular topics on social media networks right now. Many politicians use micro-blogging services like Twitter because they have a large number of followers and supporters on those networks. Politicians, political part…
Precise user and item embedding learning is the key to building a successful recommender system. Traditionally, Collaborative Filtering(CF) provides a way to learn user and item embeddings from the user-item interaction history. However, the performance is limited due to the sparseness of user behavior data. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommender systems have been proposed to utilize each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity for better user embedding modeling. We argue that, for each user of a social platform, her potential embedding is i…
The year 2020 will be remembered for two events of global significance: the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In this chapter, we summarize recent studies using large public Twitter data sets on these issues. We have three primary objectives. First, we delineate epistemological and practical considerations when combining the traditions of computational research and social science research. A sensible balance should be struck when the stakes are high between advancing social theory and concrete, timely reporting of ongoing events. We additionally comment on the computationa…
Social media is becoming an increasingly important data source for learning about breaking news and for following the latest developments of ongoing news. This is in part possible thanks to the existence of mobile devices, which allows anyone with access to the Internet to post updates from anywhere, leading in turn to a growing presence of citizen journalism. Consequently, social media has become a go-to resource for journalists during the process of newsgathering. Use of social media for newsgathering is however challenging, and suitable tools are needed in order to facilitate access to usef…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most successful approaches for recommender systems. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommendation has become a popular research direction. Most of these social recommendation models utilized each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity issue in CF. However, they only considered the local neighbors of each user and neglected the process that users' preferences are influenced as information diffuses in the social network. Recently, Graph Convolutional Networks~(GCN) have shown promising results by modelin…
Learning Social Influence with Unobserved Attention
Complex Systems Institute, University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学复杂系统研究所）；Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校应用数学系）；Honors College Applied Mathematics, Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学荣誉学院应用数学）；Department of Mathematics and Computational Data Science, Hamline University（哈姆林大学数学与计算数据科学系）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Eastern Kentucky University（东肯塔基大学数学与统计系）；Department of Computer Science, Middlebury College（明德学院计算机科学系）；Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College（哈维穆德学院数学系）
We live in a virtual world where actual lifestyles are replicated. The growing reliance on the use of social media networks worldwide has resulted in great concern for information security. One of the factors popularizing the social media platforms is how they connect people worldwide to interact, share content, and engage in mutual interactions of common interest that cut across geographical boundaries. Behind all these incredible gains are digital crime equivalence that threatens the physical socialization. Criminal-minded elements and hackers are exploiting Social Media Platforms (SMP) for …
