Related papers: Modelling structure and predicting dynamics of dis…
In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the increasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome,…
Many social media platforms offer a mechanism for readers to react to comments, both positively and negatively, which in aggregate can be thought of as community endorsement. This paper addresses the problem of predicting community…
Opinion dynamics is an important and very active area of research that delves into the complex processes through which individuals form and modify their opinions within a social context. The ability to comprehend and unravel the mechanisms…
In online debates individual arguments support or attack each other, leading to some subset of arguments being considered more relevant than others. However, in large discussions readers are often forced to sample a subset of the arguments…
The dynamical processes taking place on a network depend on its topology. Influencing the growth process of a network therefore has important implications on such dynamical processes. We formulate the problem of influencing the growth of a…
Conversation structure is useful for both understanding the nature of conversation dynamics and for providing features for many downstream applications such as summarization of conversations. In this work, we define the problem of…
People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…
Online forums provide rich environments where users may post questions and comments about different topics. Understanding how people behave in online forums may shed light on the fundamental mechanisms by which collective thinking emerges…
The rapid growth of social media has been witnessed during recent years as a result of the prevalence of the internet. This trend brings an increasing interest in simulating social media which can provide valuable insights to both academic…
We study user behavior in the courses offered by a major Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) provider during the summer of 2013. Since social learning is a key element of scalable education in MOOCs and is done via online discussion forums,…
We propose and analyze a mathematical model for the evolution of opinions on directed complex networks. Our model generalizes the popular DeGroot and Friedkin-Johnsen models by allowing vertices to have attributes that may influence the…
Traces of user activities recorded in online social networks such as the creation, viewing and forwarding/sharing of information over time open new possibilities to quantitatively and systematically understand the information diffusion…
Understanding how opinions spread through a community or how consensus emerges in noisy environments can have a significant impact on our comprehension of social relations among individuals. In this work a model for the dynamics of opinion…
Automatically verifying rumorous information has become an important and challenging task in natural language processing and social media analytics. Previous studies reveal that people's stances towards rumorous messages can provide…
Self-exciting processes of Hawkes type have been used to model various phenomena including earthquakes, neural activities, and views of online videos. Studies of temporal networks have revealed that sequences of social interevent times for…
We propose a novel modeling framework for time-evolving networks allowing for long-term dependence in network features that update in continuous time. Dynamic network growth is functionally parameterized via the conditional intensity of a…
Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions…
Social learning, i.e., students learning from each other through social interactions, has the potential to significantly scale up instruction in online education. In many cases, such as in massive open online courses (MOOCs), social…
Online forums are rich sources of information about user communication activity over time. Finding temporal patterns in online forum communication threads can advance our understanding of the dynamics of conversations. The main challenge of…
In this paper, we present a set of measures to quantify certain properties of threaded discussions, which are ubiquitous in online learn-ing platforms. In particular, we address how to measure the redundancy of posts, the compactness of…