Related papers: Refining the Semantics of Social Influence

Network models are used to study interconnected systems across many physical, biological, and social disciplines. Such models often assume a particular network-generating mechanism, which when fit to data produces estimates of…

Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…

Some interventions may include important spillover or dissemination effects between study participants. For example, vaccines, cash transfers, and education programs may exert a causal effect on participants beyond those to whom individual…

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…

In this work we make an attempt to understand social networks from a mathematical viewpoint. In the first instance we consider a network where each node representing an individual can connect with a neighbouring node with a certain…

We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…

I study peer effects that arise from irreversible decisions in the absence of a standard social equilibrium. I model a latent sequence of decisions in continuous time and obtain a closed-form expression for the likelihood, which allows to…

Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the…

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…

We present the first exploration of meaning shift over short periods of time in online communities using distributional representations. We create a small annotated dataset and use it to assess the performance of a standard model for…

Existing studies of how information diffuses across social networks have thus far concentrated on analysing and recovering the spread of deterministic innovations such as URLs, hashtags, and group membership. However investigating how…

The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…

It is commonly accepted that some phenomena are social: for example, individuals' smoking habits often correlate with those of their peers. Such correlations can have a variety of explanations, such as direct contagion or shared…

This paper explores the relations between social ties and cultural constructs in small groups. The analysis uses cross-sectional data comprising both social networks within three art groups and semantic networks based on verbal expressions…

The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs based on…

An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to…

Community effects on the behaviour of individuals, the community itself and other communities can be observed in a wide range of applications. This is true in scientific research, where communities of researchers have increasingly to…

A fundamental feature for understanding the diffusion of innovations through a social group is the manner in which we are influenced by our own social interactions. It is usually assumed that only direct interactions, those that form our…

Many complex systems exhibit a natural hierarchy in which elements can be ranked according to a notion of "influence". While the complete and accurate knowledge of the interactions between constituents is ordinarily required for the…

This paper aims to shed some light on the concept of virality - especially in social networks - and to provide new insights on its structure. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being…