ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Unsupervised Learning
- Creators: Liu, Huan
- Creators: Davulcu, Hasan
received increasing attention in recent years. The availability of sheer amounts of
user-generated data presents data scientists both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities are presented with additional data sources. The abundant link information
in social networks could provide another rich source in deriving implicit information
for social data mining. However, the vast majority of existing studies overwhelmingly
focus on positive links between users while negative links are also prevailing in real-
world social networks such as distrust relations in Epinions and foe links in Slashdot.
Though recent studies show that negative links have some added value over positive
links, it is dicult to directly employ them because of its distinct characteristics from
positive interactions. Another challenge is that label information is rather limited
in social media as the labeling process requires human attention and may be very
expensive. Hence, alternative criteria are needed to guide the learning process for
many tasks such as feature selection and sentiment analysis.
To address above-mentioned issues, I study two novel problems for signed social
networks mining, (1) unsupervised feature selection in signed social networks; and
(2) unsupervised sentiment analysis with signed social networks. To tackle the first problem, I propose a novel unsupervised feature selection framework SignedFS. In
particular, I model positive and negative links simultaneously for user preference
learning, and then embed the user preference learning into feature selection. To study the second problem, I incorporate explicit sentiment signals in textual terms and
implicit sentiment signals from signed social networks into a coherent model Signed-
Senti. Empirical experiments on real-world datasets corroborate the effectiveness of
these two frameworks on the tasks of feature selection and sentiment analysis.
Second, I focus on detecting negative linkages between politically motivated social media users. Major social media platforms do not facilitate their users with built-in negative interaction options. However, many political network analysis tasks rely on not only positive but also negative linkages. Here, I present the SocLSFact framework to detect negative linkages among social media users. It utilizes three pieces of information; sentiment cues of textual interactions, positive interactions, and socially balanced triads. I evaluate the contribution of each three aspects in negative link detection performance on multiple tasks.
Third, I propose an experimental setup that quantifies the polarization impact of automated accounts on Twitter retweet networks. I focus on a dataset of tragic Parkland shooting event and its aftermath. I show that when automated accounts are removed from the retweet network the network polarization decrease significantly, while a same number of accounts to the automated accounts are removed randomly the difference is not significant. I also find that prominent predictors of engagement of automatically generated content is not very different than what previous studies point out in general engaging content on social media. Last but not least, I identify accounts which self-disclose their automated nature in their profile by using expressions such as bot, chat-bot, or robot. I find that human engagement to self-disclosing accounts compared to non-disclosing automated accounts is much smaller. This observational finding can motivate further efforts into automated account detection research to prevent their unintended impact.
In the wild, attributed graphs are usually unlabeled. Moreover, annotating data is an expensive and time-consuming process, which suffers from many limitations such as annotators’ subjectivity, reproducibility, and consistency. The challenges of data annotation and the growing increase of unlabeled attributed graphs in various real-world applications significantly demand unsupervised learning for attributed graphs.
In this dissertation, I propose a set of novel models to learn from attributed graphs in an unsupervised manner. To better understand and represent nodes and communities in attributed graphs, I present different models in node and community levels. In node level, I utilize node features as well as the graph structure in attributed graphs to learn distributed representations of nodes, which can be useful in a variety of downstream machine learning applications. In community level, with a focus on social media, I take advantage of both node attributes and the graph structure to discover not only communities but also their sentiment-driven profiles and inter-community relations (i.e., alliance, antagonism, or no relation). The discovered community profiles and relations help to better understand the structure and dynamics of social media.