Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

ICWSM 2011 Papers, with Links

ICWSM 2011 recently published its list of accepted papers. I've taken a look at the list, searched online for those that have been made available by the publishers and linked them up below.

• Rating Friends Without Making Enemies, Lada Adamic, Debra Lauterbach, Chun-Yuen Teng, Mark Ackerman
• Center of Attention: How Facebook Users Allocate Attention across Friends, Lars Backstrom, Eytan Bakshy, Jon Kleinberg, Thomas Lento, Itamar Rosen
• 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community, Michael S. Bernstein, Andrès Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul Andrè, Katrina Panovich, Greg Vargas
• Exploring Millions of Footprints in Location Sharing Services, Zhiyuan Cheng, James Caverlee, Kyumin Lee, Daniel Z. Sui
• Political Polarization on Twitter, Michael Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew Francisco, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer
• Timing Tweets to Increase Effectiveness of Information Campaigns, Onkar Dabeer, Prachi Mehendale, Aditya Karnik, Atul Saroop
• Media landscape in Twitter: A world of new conventions and political diversity, An Jisun, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna P. Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft
• When the Wikipedians talk: network and tree structure of Wikipedia discussion pages, David Laniado, Riccardo Tasso, Yana Volkovich, Andreas Kaltenbrunner
• Seven Months with the Devils: A Long-Term Study of Content Polluters on Twitter, Kyumin Lee, Brian Eoff, James Caverlee
• The Party is Over Here: Structure and Content in the 2010 Election, Avishay Livne, Matthew P. Simmons, Eytan Adar, Lada Adamic
• The Prevalence of Political Discourse in Non-Political Blogs, Sean Munson, Paul Resnick
• What's in a @name ? How Name Value Biases Judgment of Microblog Authors, Aditya Pal, Scott Counts
• Detecting and Tracking Political Abuse in Social Media, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Michael Conover, Mark Meiss, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer
• Socio-spatial Properties of Online Location-based Social Networks, Salvatore Scellato, Renaud Lambiotte, Cecilia Mascolo, Anastasios Noulas
• Just a Click Away: Social Search and Metadata in Predicting File Discovery, N. Sadat Shami, Michael Muller, David R. Millen
• Differential Adaptive Diffusion: Understanding Diversity and Learning whom to Trust in Viral Market, Hossam Sharara, William Rand, Lise Getoor
• Memes Online: Extracted, Subtracted, Injected, and Recollected, Matthew P. Simmons, Lada Adamic, Eytan Adar
• Participation Maximization Based on Social Influence in Online Discussion Forums, Sun Tao, Wei Chen, Zhenming Liu, Yajun Wang, Xiaorui Sun, Ming Zhang, Chin-Yew Lin
• What stops social epidemics?, Greg Ver Steeg, Rumi Ghosh, Kristina Lerman
• Identifying Representative Textual Sources in Blog Networks, Karen Wade, Derek Greene, Conrad Lee, Daniel Archambault, Padraig Cunningham
• Culture Matters: A Survey Study of Social Q&A Behavior, Jiang Yang, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jaime Teevan, Lada Adamic, Mark Ackerman

A Visual Guide to the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)

I’m continually impressed by the breadth of content presented at ICWSM. This conference is truly achieving a unique position for social media and social network researchers: bringing together social science and computer science. I thought it would be interesting to capture the conference visually, so below is a selection of the visual representations of data and results from some of the papers from the conference. Each is linked to the online paper page, so click through to learn more!

 

A Unifying Framework for Social Media Research

Here at ICWSM we are getting great presentations from all the various fields concerned with social media. These include: text mining, artificial intelligence (especially NLP/CompLing), psychology, graph algorithms, social network theory, data visualization/UI design and data mining. One of the major roles and purposes of the conference is to bring these areas together to better model, support and leverage social media. To do this, I think we need to be explicit about where the intersections lie. Of course, drawing a graph of these relationships is likely to produce a fully connected graph, but before we do that we can at least highlight some key relationships.

Psychology and Text Mining

Much of the work on text mining focuses on the document – and yet we are concerned with social media, in other words, media produced by individuals in a social context. Where is the individual or community? Understanding opinion must take into account some model of what opinion is (a belief), the psychological processes of opinion (how do we change opinion?) and so on. Documents do not have opinions, people do!

Text Mining and Social Networks

The most obvious thing I see here is the relationship between appraisal (sentiment/opinion/…) and notions of community, influence and authority. Opinions are formed by people in the context of some environment. Often, that environment will include one or more individuals who are expressing the same (or opposite) opinion on the same topic. Is there pressure (in a public forum) to express agreeable opinions? If so, should we discount them in some way?

Text Mining and AI/NLP

While text mining often eschews deep representations, when we look at reviews and other opinion laden text, we can see clear indications of both expressions of ontological structure (‘the camera has a great lens’) and discourse structure (‘it has a great lens, however…’). Certainly we must avoid problems of AI or NLP completeness, but we should also build more detailed models of these aspects of opinion expression. There are some publications already that weave discourse structure into sentiment mining which is a great start.

Text Mining and Data Visualization/UI Design

Opinion mining is challenging, but we are getting to the point where some practical value can emerge. However, improving the value of the technologies is not something that needs to be limited to improving the basic accuracy of the inference piece. By exploring how results can be amplified and the impact of errors can be diffused we can get more out of what we already have.

I believe that attendees of ICWSM have a great opportunity (and many of us are already benefiting from it) to fully leverage interactions between different research communities. In some ways, this is what defines our meeting.

ICWSM 2009 – Getting Close

The stage is pretty much set for our third meeting. If you want to hear about some awesome social media research,  hear talks from Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee and Duncan Watts and hang out with the young, talented and attractive masters of social media, then I will see you in San Jose!

ICWSM Data Workshop Papers

The papers accepted to the ICWSM 2009 Data Challenge Workshop are now listed on the conference site.

• Identifying Personal Stories in Millions of Weblog Entries, Andrew Gordon and Reid Swanson
• SentiSearch: Exploring Mood on the Web, Sara Sood and Lucy Vasserman
• What Bloggers Talk About: Interconnection and Content Sharing in Weblogs, Meeyoung Cha, Juan Antonio Navarro Perez, and Hamed Haddadi
• Event Intensity Tracking in Weblog Collections, Viet Ha Thuc, Yelena Mejova, Christopher Harris and Padmini Srinivasan
• Quantification of Topic Propagation using Percolation Theory: A study of the ICWSM Network, Ali Azimi Bolourian, Yashar Moshfeghi and C. J. van Rijsbergen

ICWSM 2009 Accepted Papers

The papers accepted to ICWSM 2009 are up on the site!

AAAI Opens Access to Digital Library

I've just heard that AAAI (the parent organization of ICWSM and many other outstanding conferences) has completed the opening of access to online versions of all papers. This is a great step to make and I believe that all will benefit from it (authors, conferences and AAAI).

Some key conferences:

• ICWSM 2008
• AAAI 1980 - the first AAAI conferece!
• KDD 1996 - the first KDD conference while still at AAAI

Congratulations to everyone at AAAI!

15 days and Counting…

That’s right – only 15 days until January 20th, which means only 16 days until the submission deadline for ICWSM 2009! Need a reason for going? Take a look at the line up of invited speakers:

• Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University, USA
    Jon Kleinberg is a Professor of computer science at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a recipient of the 2005 MacArthur "Genius Award".
• Lillian Lee, Cornell University, USA
    Lillian Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell. She is well-known for her work in sentiment analysis, and has recently co-authored the book "Opinion mining and sentiment analysis". She has also authored influential work in many other aspects of statistical natural language processing, including in the areas of distributional similarity and natural language generation.
• Duncan Watts, Columbia University, USA and Yahoo! Research
    Duncan J. Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University. His research focuses on the structure and evolution of social networks, the origins and consequences of social influence, and the nature of distributed "social" search. Among his many published works, he is particularly known for his 1998 paper with Steven Strogatz in which the two presented a mathematical theory of the small world phenomenon.

You could also take a look at the program from last year, but why do that when you can watch all the presentations online via VideoLectures.net, including invited talks from Brad Fitzpatrick, Marc Smith and David Sifry.

ICWSM 2009 Speakers

Our website has been updated with the keynote/invited speakers. We are really honoured to have Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee and Duncan Watts appearing at the conference.

ICWSM Call for Papers

The CFP for ICWSM 2009 is now officially out!

Call for papers – 2009

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The social and community driven aspects of our digital lives continue to rapidly increase, resulting in transformative behaviours and, significantly, publishing and distributing huge amounts of fascinating data. The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will meet once more in 2009 to discuss the latest research analyzing and leveraging this resource. As with previous meetings, we will bring together a wide range of researchers and industry practitioners from many disciplines providing a unique opportunity for sharing ideas and collaboration in this space.

AREAS OF INTEREST

Disciplines which are relevant to our meeting include computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies. The following are key areas of interest:
[01] Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
[02] Analyzing relationship between social media and mainstream media
[03] Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors both within genres and between genres of data
[04] Ranking/relevance of blogs; web page ranking based on blogs
[05] Data acquisition: crawling/spidering and indexing
[06] Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualization
[07] Multimedia: tools and techniques for distribution, sharing, and analysis of social activity with/around multimedia.
[08] Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization
[09] Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management; collaborative creation of structured knowledge
[10] Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction
[11] Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery; collaborative filtering
[12] Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
[13] Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media
[14] New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques
[15] Trust; reputation; recommendation systems

IMPORTANT DATES

Tutorial Proposals: December 1, 2008
Paper Submission: January 21, 2009
Poster/Demo Submission: January 21, 2009
Paper Acceptance: February 27, 2009
Poster/Demo Acceptance: February 27, 2009
Camera Ready Copies: March 10, 2009
Tutorials: May 17, 2009
Conference: May 18-20, 2009

SUBMISSION

People interested in participating should submit through the ICWSM-09 website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by the deadlines given above (Midnight PST). Papers must be must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the AAAI author instructions page at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php). Authors must register at the ICWSM-09 technical paper submission web site (available by November 15, 2008). The software will assign a password, which will enable the author to log on to submit an abstract and paper. In order to avoid a rush at the last minute, authors are encouraged to register as soon as possible.

Submissions to Other Conferences or Journals
ICWSM-09 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or conference. This restriction does not apply to submissions for workshops and other venues with a limited audience.

REGISTRATION

All accepted papers and extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. At least one author must register for the conference by the deadline for camera-ready copy submission. In addition, the registered author must attend the conference to present the paper in person.

PUBLICATION

All accepted papers and abstracts will be allocated eight (8) pages in the conference proceedings. Authors will be required to transfer copyright of their paper to AAAI.

DATA CHALLENGE

ICWSM-09 is planning to release a large blog dataset in conjunction with the conference. This data will include the full content and markup of the blog post as well as extracted text. The conference invites researchers to explore the dataset and submit their findings as technical papers. More information will appear soon on the conference website.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND TUTORIAL SPEAKERS

Traditionally the conference invites world renowned experts to present tutorials and give keynote talks. These will be announced soon.

General Chairs

• William W. Cohen, Carnegie Mellon/Google
• Nicolas Nicolov, J.D.Power and Assoc., McGraw-Hill

Program Chairs

• Natalie Glance, Google
• Matthew Hurst, Live Labs, Microsoft

Data Chairs

• Ian Soboroff, NIST
• Akshay Java, UMBC

Local Chair

• Cameron Marlow, Facebook

Program Committee

• Lada Adamic, University of Michigan, USA
• Navot Akiva, Pudding Media, Israel
• Noor Ali-Hasan, Microsoft, USA
• Chris Brooks, University of San Francisco, USA
• Claire Cardie, Cornell University, USA
• Steve Cayzer, HP Labs, UK
• Lili Cheng, Microsoft, USA
• Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Thierry Declerck, DFKI GmbH, Germany
• Brian Dennis, Lockheed Martin Corporation, USA
• Chris Diehl, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA
• Joan Morris DiMicco, IBM Research, USA
• Nathan Eagle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Miriam Eckert, J.D. Power and Assoc., McGraw-Hill, USA
• Raymond Elferink, RayCom B.V., The Netherlands
• Andrew Fiore, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Kathy E Gill, University of Washington, USA
• Scott Golder, Cornell University, USA
• Marko Grobelnik, J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Michelle Gumbrecht, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
• John Henderson, MITRE, USA
• Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
• Steliana Ivanova, Umbria Inc., USA
• Heng Ji, The City University of New York, USA
• Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
• Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
• Jason Kessler, Indiana University, USA
• Pranam Kolari, Yahoo!, USA
• Christian Konig, Microsoft, USA
• Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
• Gueorgi Kossinets, Google, USA
• Andrea La Pietra, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Thomas Lento, Facebook, USA
• Kristina Lerman, University of Southern California, USA
• Jure Leskovec, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Naohiro Matsumura, Osaka University, Japan
• Charles Mi, Opinmind, USA
• Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
• Gilad Mishne, Yahoo!, USA
• Paola Monachesi, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Mor Naaman, Rutgers University, USA
• Kate Niederhoffer, Nielsen, USA
• Scott Nowson, Appen, Australia
• Manabu Okumura, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Livia Polanyi, Powerset/Microsoft, USA
• John Prager, IBM Research, USA
• Stephan Raaijmakers, TNO ICT, The Netherlands
• Drago Radev, University of Michigan, USA
• Laura Ripamonti, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
• Tamas Sarlos, Yahoo!, USA
• Jonathan Schler, Peer39, Israel
• David A. Shamma, Yahoo! Research, USA
• James G. Shanahan, USA
• Xiaolin Shi, University of Michigan, USA
• Sanjay Sood, allvoices, USA
• Ellen Spertus, Google, USA
• Siddharth Suri, Yahoo!, USA
• Hideaki Takeda, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• Jiang Yang, University of Michigan, USA
• Cheng Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Jun Zhang, University of Michigan, USA
• Ding Zhou, Facebook, USA

For general information regarding ICWSM-09, please write to [email protected].