Matching Items (17)
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- All Subjects: Social Media
- All Subjects: Clustering
- All Subjects: Information retrieval
- Creators: Davulcu, Hasan
Description
Multidimensional data have various representations. Thanks to their simplicity in modeling multidimensional data and the availability of various mathematical tools (such as tensor decompositions) that support multi-aspect analysis of such data, tensors are increasingly being used in many application domains including scientific data management, sensor data management, and social network data analysis. Relational model, on the other hand, enables semantic manipulation of data using relational operators, such as projection, selection, Cartesian-product, and set operators. For many multidimensional data applications, tensor operations as well as relational operations need to be supported throughout the data life cycle. In this thesis, we introduce a tensor-based relational data model (TRM), which enables both tensor- based data analysis and relational manipulations of multidimensional data, and define tensor-relational operations on this model. Then we introduce a tensor-relational data management system, so called, TensorDB. TensorDB is based on TRM, which brings together relational algebraic operations (for data manipulation and integration) and tensor algebraic operations (for data analysis). We develop optimization strategies for tensor-relational operations in both in-memory and in-database TensorDB. The goal of the TRM and TensorDB is to serve as a single environment that supports the entire life cycle of data; that is, data can be manipulated, integrated, processed, and analyzed.
ContributorsKim, Mijung (Author) / Candan, K. Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where the users can be social, informational or both. In certain cases, users generate tweets that have no "hashtags" or "@mentions"; we call it an orphaned tweet. The user will be more interested to find more "context" of an orphaned tweet presumably to engage with his/her friend on that topic. Finding context for an Orphaned tweet manually is challenging because of larger social graph of a user , the enormous volume of tweets generated per second, topic diversity, and limited information from tweet length of 140 characters. To help the user to get the context of an orphaned tweet, this thesis aims at building a hashtag recommendation system called TweetSense, to suggest hashtags as a context or metadata for the orphaned tweets. This in turn would increase user's social engagement and impact Twitter to maintain its monthly active online users in its social network. In contrast to other existing systems, this hashtag recommendation system recommends personalized hashtags by exploiting the social signals of users in Twitter. The novelty with this system is that it emphasizes on selecting the suitable candidate set of hashtags from the related tweets of user's social graph (timeline).The system then rank them based on the combination of features scores computed from their tweet and user related features. It is evaluated based on its ability to predict suitable hashtags for a random sample of tweets whose existing hashtags are deliberately removed for evaluation. I present a detailed internal empirical evaluation of TweetSense, as well as an external evaluation in comparison with current state of the art method.
ContributorsVijayakumar, Manikandan (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Crises or large-scale emergencies such as earthquakes and hurricanes cause massive damage to lives and property. Crisis response is an essential task to mitigate the impact of a crisis. An effective response to a crisis necessitates information gathering and analysis. Traditionally, this process has been restricted to the information collected by first responders on the ground in the affected region or by official agencies such as local governments involved in the response. However, the ubiquity of mobile devices has empowered people to publish information during a crisis through social media, such as the damage reports from a hurricane. Social media has thus emerged as an important channel of information which can be leveraged to improve crisis response. Twitter is a popular medium which has been employed in recent crises. However, it presents new challenges: the data is noisy and uncurated, and it has high volume and high velocity. In this work, I study four key problems in the use of social media for crisis response: effective monitoring and analysis of high volume crisis tweets, detecting crisis events automatically in streaming data, identifying users who can be followed to effectively monitor crisis, and finally understanding user behavior during crisis to detect tweets inside crisis regions. To address these problems I propose two systems which assist disaster responders or analysts to collaboratively collect tweets related to crisis and analyze it using visual analytics to identify interesting regions, topics, and users involved in disaster response. I present a novel approach to detecting crisis events automatically in noisy, high volume Twitter streams. I also investigate and introduce novel methods to tackle information overload through the identification of information leaders in information diffusion who can be followed for efficient crisis monitoring and identification of messages originating from crisis regions using user behavior analysis.
ContributorsKumar, Shamanth (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Agarwal, Nitin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
US Senate is the venue of political debates where the federal bills are formed and voted. Senators show their support/opposition along the bills with their votes. This information makes it possible to extract the polarity of the senators. Similarly, blogosphere plays an increasingly important role as a forum for public debate. Authors display sentiment toward issues, organizations or people using a natural language.
In this research, given a mixed set of senators/blogs debating on a set of political issues from opposing camps, I use signed bipartite graphs for modeling debates, and I propose an algorithm for partitioning both the opinion holders (senators or blogs) and the issues (bills or topics) comprising the debate into binary opposing camps. Simultaneously, my algorithm scales the entities on a univariate scale. Using this scale, a researcher can identify moderate and extreme senators/blogs within each camp, and polarizing versus unifying issues. Through performance evaluations I show that my proposed algorithm provides an effective solution to the problem, and performs much better than existing baseline algorithms adapted to solve this new problem. In my experiments, I used both real data from political blogosphere and US Congress records, as well as synthetic data which were obtained by varying polarization and degree distribution of the vertices of the graph to show the robustness of my algorithm.
I also applied my algorithm on all the terms of the US Senate to the date for longitudinal analysis and developed a web based interactive user interface www.PartisanScale.com to visualize the analysis.
US politics is most often polarized with respect to the left/right alignment of the entities. However, certain issues do not reflect the polarization due to political parties, but observe a split correlating to the demographics of the senators, or simply receive consensus. I propose a hierarchical clustering algorithm that identifies groups of bills that share the same polarization characteristics. I developed a web based interactive user interface www.ControversyAnalysis.com to visualize the clusters while providing a synopsis through distribution charts, word clouds, and heat maps.
In this research, given a mixed set of senators/blogs debating on a set of political issues from opposing camps, I use signed bipartite graphs for modeling debates, and I propose an algorithm for partitioning both the opinion holders (senators or blogs) and the issues (bills or topics) comprising the debate into binary opposing camps. Simultaneously, my algorithm scales the entities on a univariate scale. Using this scale, a researcher can identify moderate and extreme senators/blogs within each camp, and polarizing versus unifying issues. Through performance evaluations I show that my proposed algorithm provides an effective solution to the problem, and performs much better than existing baseline algorithms adapted to solve this new problem. In my experiments, I used both real data from political blogosphere and US Congress records, as well as synthetic data which were obtained by varying polarization and degree distribution of the vertices of the graph to show the robustness of my algorithm.
I also applied my algorithm on all the terms of the US Senate to the date for longitudinal analysis and developed a web based interactive user interface www.PartisanScale.com to visualize the analysis.
US politics is most often polarized with respect to the left/right alignment of the entities. However, certain issues do not reflect the polarization due to political parties, but observe a split correlating to the demographics of the senators, or simply receive consensus. I propose a hierarchical clustering algorithm that identifies groups of bills that share the same polarization characteristics. I developed a web based interactive user interface www.ControversyAnalysis.com to visualize the clusters while providing a synopsis through distribution charts, word clouds, and heat maps.
ContributorsGokalp, Sedat (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Woodward, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
With the rise of social media, hundreds of millions of people spend countless hours all over the globe on social media to connect, interact, share, and create user-generated data. This rich environment provides tremendous opportunities for many different players to easily and effectively reach out to people, interact with them, influence them, or get their opinions. There are two pieces of information that attract most attention on social media sites, including user preferences and interactions. Businesses and organizations use this information to better understand and therefore provide customized services to social media users. This data can be used for different purposes such as, targeted advertisement, product recommendation, or even opinion mining. Social media sites use this information to better serve their users.
Despite the importance of personal information, in many cases people do not reveal this information to the public. Predicting the hidden or missing information is a common response to this challenge. In this thesis, we address the problem of predicting user attributes and future or missing links using an egocentric approach. The current research proposes novel concepts and approaches to better understand social media users in twofold including, a) their attributes, preferences, and interests, and b) their future or missing connections and interactions. More specifically, the contributions of this dissertation are (1) proposing a framework to study social media users through their attributes and link information, (2) proposing a scalable algorithm to predict user preferences; and (3) proposing a novel approach to predict attributes and links with limited information. The proposed algorithms use an egocentric approach to improve the state of the art algorithms in two directions. First by improving the prediction accuracy, and second, by increasing the scalability of the algorithms.
Despite the importance of personal information, in many cases people do not reveal this information to the public. Predicting the hidden or missing information is a common response to this challenge. In this thesis, we address the problem of predicting user attributes and future or missing links using an egocentric approach. The current research proposes novel concepts and approaches to better understand social media users in twofold including, a) their attributes, preferences, and interests, and b) their future or missing connections and interactions. More specifically, the contributions of this dissertation are (1) proposing a framework to study social media users through their attributes and link information, (2) proposing a scalable algorithm to predict user preferences; and (3) proposing a novel approach to predict attributes and links with limited information. The proposed algorithms use an egocentric approach to improve the state of the art algorithms in two directions. First by improving the prediction accuracy, and second, by increasing the scalability of the algorithms.
ContributorsAbbasi, Mohammad Ali, 1975- (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Agarwal, Nitin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Analysis of political texts, which contains a huge amount of personal political opinions, sentiments, and emotions towards powerful individuals, leaders, organizations, and a large number of people, is an interesting task, which can lead to discover interesting interactions between the political parties and people. Recently, political blogosphere plays an increasingly important role in politics, as a forum for debating political issues. Most of the political weblogs are biased towards their political parties, and they generally express their sentiments towards their issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) and also towards issues of the opposing parties. In this thesis, I have modeled the above interactions/debate as a sentimental bi-partite graph, a bi-partite graph with Blogs forming vertices of a disjoint set, and the issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) forming the other disjoint set,and the edges between the two sets representing the sentiment of the blogs towards the issues. I have used American Political blog data to model the sentimental bi- partite graph, in particular, a set of popular political liberal and conservative blogs that have clearly declared positions. These blogs contain discussion about social, political, economic issues and related key individuals in their conservative/liberal view. To be more focused and more polarized, 22 most popular liberal/conservative blogs of a particular time period, May 2008 - October 2008(because of high intensity of debate and discussions), just before the presidential elections, was considered, involving around 23,800 articles. This thesis involves solving the questions: a) which is the most liberal/conservative blogs on the web? b) Who is on which side of debate and what are the issues? c) Who are the important leaders? d) How do you model the relationship between the participants of the debate and the underlying issues?
ContributorsThirumalai, Dananjayan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
With the advent of Internet, the data being added online is increasing at enormous rate. Though search engines are using IR techniques to facilitate the search requests from users, the results are not effective towards the search query of the user. The search engine user has to go through certain webpages before getting at the webpage he/she wanted. This problem of Information Overload can be solved using Automatic Text Summarization. Summarization is a process of obtaining at abridged version of documents so that user can have a quick view to understand what exactly the document is about. Email threads from W3C are used in this system. Apart from common IR features like Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency, Term Rank, a variation of page rank based on graph model, which can cluster the words with respective to word ambiguity, is implemented. Term Rank also considers the possibility of co-occurrence of words with the corpus and evaluates the rank of the word accordingly. Sentences of email threads are ranked as per features and summaries are generated. System implemented the concept of pyramid evaluation in content selection. The system can be considered as a framework for Unsupervised Learning in text summarization.
ContributorsNadella, Sravan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This research start utilizing an efficient sparse inverse covariance matrix (precision matrix) estimation technique to identify a set of highly correlated discriminative perspectives between radical and counter-radical groups. A ranking system has been developed that utilizes ranked perspectives to map Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral scales based on their web site corpus. Simultaneously, a gold standard ranking of these organizations was created through domain experts and compute expert-to-expert agreements and present experimental results comparing the performance of the QUIC based scaling system to another baseline method for organizations. The QUIC based algorithm not only outperforms the baseline methods, but it is also the only system that consistently performs at area expert-level accuracies for all scales. Also, a multi-scale ideological model has been developed and it investigates the correlates of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, Nigeria and UK. This analysis demonstrate that violence does not correlate strongly with broad Muslim theological or sectarian orientations; it shows that religious diversity intolerance is the only consistent and statistically significant ideological correlate of Islamic extremism in these countries, alongside desire for political change in UK and Indonesia, and social change in Nigeria. Next, dynamic issues and communities tracking system based on NMF(Non-negative Matrix Factorization) co-clustering algorithm has been built to better understand the dynamics of virtual communities. The system used between Iran and Saudi Arabia to build and apply a multi-party agent-based model that can demonstrate the role of wedges and spoilers in a complex environment where coalitions are dynamic. Lastly, a visual intelligence platform for tracking the diffusion of online social movements has been developed called LookingGlass to track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups. The algorithm utilize large amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations’ media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales. Discriminating perspectives is utilized to classify and map individual Tweeter’s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their tweets.
ContributorsKim, Nyunsu (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Corman, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Social media has become a direct and effective means of transmitting personal opinions into the cyberspace. The use of certain key-words and their connotations in tweets portray a meaning that goes beyond the screen and affects behavior. During terror attacks or worldwide crises, people turn to social media as a means of managing their anxiety, a mechanism of Terror Management Theory (TMT). These opinions have distinct impacts on the emotions that people express both online and offline through both positive and negative sentiments. This paper focuses on using sentiment analysis on twitter hash-tags during five major terrorist attacks that created a significant response on social media, which collectively show the effects that 140-character tweets have on perceptions in social media. The purpose of analyzing the sentiments of tweets after terror attacks allows for the visualization of the effect of key-words and the possibility of manipulation by the use of emotional contagion. Through sentiment analysis, positive, negative and neutral emotions were portrayed in the tweets. The keywords detected also portray characteristics about terror attacks which would allow for future analysis and predictions in regards to propagating a specific emotion on social media during future crisis.
ContributorsHarikumar, Swathikrishna (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis director) / Bodford, Jessica (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Browsing Twitter users, or browsers, often find it increasingly cumbersome to attach meaning to tweets that are displayed on their timeline as they follow more and more users or pages. The tweets being browsed are created by Twitter users called originators, and are of some significance to the browser who has chosen to subscribe to the tweets from the originator by following the originator. Although, hashtags are used to tag tweets in an effort to attach context to the tweets, many tweets do not have a hashtag. Such tweets are called orphan tweets and they adversely affect the experience of a browser.
A hashtag is a type of label or meta-data tag used in social networks and micro-blogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content. The context of a tweet can be defined as a set of one or more hashtags. Users often do not use hashtags to tag their tweets. This leads to the problem of missing context for tweets. To address the problem of missing hashtags, a statistical method was proposed which predicts most likely hashtags based on the social circle of an originator.
In this thesis, we propose to improve on the existing context recovery system by selectively limiting the candidate set of hashtags to be derived from the intimate circle of the originator rather than from every user in the social network of the originator. This helps in reducing the computation, increasing speed of prediction, scaling the system to originators with large social networks while still preserving most of the accuracy of the predictions. We also propose to not only derive the candidate hashtags from the social network of the originator but also derive the candidate hashtags based on the content of the tweet. We further propose to learn personalized statistical models according to the adoption patterns of different originators. This helps in not only identifying the personalized candidate set of hashtags based on the social circle and content of the tweets but also in customizing the hashtag adoption pattern to the originator of the tweet.
A hashtag is a type of label or meta-data tag used in social networks and micro-blogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content. The context of a tweet can be defined as a set of one or more hashtags. Users often do not use hashtags to tag their tweets. This leads to the problem of missing context for tweets. To address the problem of missing hashtags, a statistical method was proposed which predicts most likely hashtags based on the social circle of an originator.
In this thesis, we propose to improve on the existing context recovery system by selectively limiting the candidate set of hashtags to be derived from the intimate circle of the originator rather than from every user in the social network of the originator. This helps in reducing the computation, increasing speed of prediction, scaling the system to originators with large social networks while still preserving most of the accuracy of the predictions. We also propose to not only derive the candidate hashtags from the social network of the originator but also derive the candidate hashtags based on the content of the tweet. We further propose to learn personalized statistical models according to the adoption patterns of different originators. This helps in not only identifying the personalized candidate set of hashtags based on the social circle and content of the tweets but also in customizing the hashtag adoption pattern to the originator of the tweet.
ContributorsMallapura Umamaheshwar, Tejas (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015