Exploring Friends’ Influence in Cultures in Twitter - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Exploring Friends’ Influence in Cultures in Twitter

Anika Gupta, Katia P. Sycara, Geoffrey J. Gordon, and Ahmed Hefny
Conference Paper, Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '13), pp. 584 - 591, August, 2013

Abstract

What does a user do when he logs in to the Twitter website? Does he merely browse through the tweets of all his friends as a source of information for his own tweets, or does he simply tweet a message of his own personal interest? Does he skim through the tweets of all his friends or only of a selected few? A number of factors might influence a user in these decisions. Does this social influence vary across cultures? In our work, we propose a simple yet effective model to predict the behavior of a user - in terms of which hashtag or named entity he might include in his future tweets. We have approached the problem as a classification task with the various influences contributing as features. Further, we analyze the contribution of the weights of the different features. Using our model we analyze data from different cultures and discover interesting differences in social influence.

BibTeX

@conference{Gupta-2013-120852,
author = {Anika Gupta and Katia P. Sycara and Geoffrey J. Gordon and Ahmed Hefny},
title = {Exploring Friends’ Influence in Cultures in Twitter},
booktitle = {Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '13)},
year = {2013},
month = {August},
pages = {584 - 591},
}