Matching Items (15)
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- All Subjects: Twitter
- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
- Creators: Davulcu, Hasan
Description
The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweet's content alone. I propose a method of ranking tweets by generating a reputation score for each tweet that is based not just on content, but also additional information from the Twitter ecosystem that consists of users, tweets, and the web pages that tweets link to. This information is obtained by modeling the Twitter ecosystem as a three-layer graph. The reputation score is used to power two novel methods of ranking tweets by propagating the reputation over an agreement graph based on tweets' content similarity. Additionally, I show how the agreement graph helps counter tweet spam. An evaluation of my method on 16~million tweets from the TREC 2011 Microblog Dataset shows that it doubles the precision over baseline Twitter Search and achieves higher precision than current state of the art method. I present a detailed internal empirical evaluation of RAProp in comparison to several alternative approaches proposed by me, as well as external evaluation in comparison to the current state of the art method.
ContributorsRavikumar, Srijith (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Bots tamper with social media networks by artificially inflating the popularity of certain topics. In this paper, we define what a bot is, we detail different motivations for bots, we describe previous work in bot detection and observation, and then we perform bot detection of our own. For our bot detection, we are interested in bots on Twitter that tweet Arabic extremist-like phrases. A testing dataset is collected using the honeypot method, and five different heuristics are measured for their effectiveness in detecting bots. The model underperformed, but we have laid the ground-work for a vastly untapped focus on bot detection: extremist ideal diffusion through bots.
ContributorsKarlsrud, Mark C. (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis director) / Morstatter, Fred (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Twitter has become a very popular social media site that is used daily by many people and organizations. This paper will focus on the financial aspect of Twitter, as a process will be shown to be able to mine data about specific companies' stock prices. This was done by writing a program to grab tweets about the stocks of the thirty companies in the Dow Jones.
ContributorsLarson, Grant Elliott (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis director) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The prevalence of bots, or automated accounts, on social media is a well-known problem. Some of the ways bots harm social media users include, but are not limited to, spreading misinformation, influencing topic discussions, and dispersing harmful links. Bots have affected the field of disaster relief on social media as well. These bots cause problems such as preventing rescuers from determining credible calls for help, spreading fake news and other malicious content, and generating large amounts of content which burdens rescuers attempting to provide aid in the aftermath of disasters. To address these problems, this research seeks to detect bots participating in disaster event related discussions and increase the recall, or number of bots removed from the network, of Twitter bot detection methods. The removal of these bots will also prevent human users from accidentally interacting with these bot accounts and being manipulated by them. To accomplish this goal, an existing bot detection classification algorithm known as BoostOR was employed. BoostOR is an ensemble learning algorithm originally modeled to increase bot detection recall in a dataset and it has the possibility to solve the social media bot dilemma where there may be several different types of bots in the data. BoostOR was first introduced as an adjustment to existing ensemble classifiers to increase recall. However, after testing the BoostOR algorithm on unobserved datasets, results showed that BoostOR does not perform as expected. This study attempts to improve the BoostOR algorithm by comparing it with a baseline classification algorithm, AdaBoost, and then discussing the intentional differences between the two. Additionally, this study presents the main factors which contribute to the shortcomings of the BoostOR algorithm and proposes a solution to improve it. These recommendations should ensure that the BoostOR algorithm can be applied to new and unobserved datasets in the future.
ContributorsDavis, Matthew William (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis director) / Nazer, Tahora H. (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
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
In trading, volume is a measure of how much stock has been exchanged in a given period of time. Since every stock is distinctive and has an alternate measure of shares, volume can be contrasted with historical volume inside a stock to spot changes. It is likewise used to affirm value patterns, breakouts, and spot potential reversals. In my thesis, I hypothesize that the concept of trading volume can be extrapolated to social media (Twitter).
The ubiquity of social media, especially Twitter, in financial market has been overly resonant in the past couple of years. With the growth of its (Twitter) usage by news channels, financial experts and pandits, the global economy does seem to hinge on 140 characters. By analyzing the number of tweets hash tagged to a stock, a strong relation can be established between the number of people talking about it, to the trading volume of the stock.
In my work, I overt this relation and find a state of the breakout when the volume goes beyond a characterized support or resistance level.
The ubiquity of social media, especially Twitter, in financial market has been overly resonant in the past couple of years. With the growth of its (Twitter) usage by news channels, financial experts and pandits, the global economy does seem to hinge on 140 characters. By analyzing the number of tweets hash tagged to a stock, a strong relation can be established between the number of people talking about it, to the trading volume of the stock.
In my work, I overt this relation and find a state of the breakout when the volume goes beyond a characterized support or resistance level.
ContributorsAwasthi, Piyush (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
With the advent of social media and micro-blogging sites, people have become active in sharing their thoughts, opinions, ideologies and furthermore enforcing them on others. Users have become the source for the production and dissemination of real time information. The content posted by the users can be used to understand them and track their behavior. Using this content of the user, data analysis can be performed to understand their social ideology and affinity towards Radical and Counter-Radical Movements. During the process of expressing their opinions people use hashtags in their messages in Twitter. These hashtags are a rich source of information in understanding the content based relationship between the online users apart from the existing context based follower and friend relationship.
An intelligent visual dash-board system is necessary which can track the activities of the users and diffusion of the online social movements, identify the hot-spots in the users' network, show the geographic foot print of the users and to understand the socio-cultural, economic and political drivers for the relationship among different groups of the users.
An intelligent visual dash-board system is necessary which can track the activities of the users and diffusion of the online social movements, identify the hot-spots in the users' network, show the geographic foot print of the users and to understand the socio-cultural, economic and political drivers for the relationship among different groups of the users.
ContributorsGaripalli, Sravan Kumar (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Shakarian, Paulo (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
With the rise of Online Social Networks (OSN) in the last decade, social network analysis has become a crucial research topic. The OSN graphs have unique properties that distinguish them from other types of graphs. In this thesis, five month Tweet corpus collected from Bangladesh - between June 2016 and October 2016 is analyzed, in order to detect accounts that belong to groups. These groups consist of official and non-official twitter handles of political organizations and NGOs in Bangladesh. A set of network, temporal, spatial and behavioral features are proposed to discriminate between accounts belonging to individual twitter users, news, groups and organization leaders. Finally, the experimental results are presented and a subset of relevant features is identified that lead to a generalizable model. Detection of tiny number of groups from large network is achieved with 0.8 precision, 0.75 recall and 0.77 F1 score. The domain independent network and behavioral features and models developed here are suitable for solving twitter account classification problem in any context.
ContributorsGore, Chinmay Chandrashekhar (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Over the past couple of years, the focus on the prevalence of hate-speech and misinformation on the internet has increased. Lawmakers feel that repealing or reforming Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act is the way to go, considering that the law has been used to protect companies from any liability in the past. In this podcast series, I will be explaining what Section 230 is, how it affects us, and what changes are being proposed. In doing so, I wish to shed a light on how the problems of the internet are not solely in the hands of social media giants and a 26-word long law, but all its users that make up our global community.
ContributorsAvi, Pratyush (Author) / Schmidt, Peter (Thesis director) / Voorhees, Matthew (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
The role of technology in shaping modern society has become increasingly important in the context of current democratic politics, especially when examined through the lens of social media. Twitter is a prominent social media platform used as a political medium, contributing to political movements such as #OccupyWallStreet, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter. Using the #BlackLivesMatter movement as an illustrative case to establish patterns in Twitter usage, this thesis aims to answer the question “to what extent is Twitter an accurate representation of “real life” in terms of performative activism and user engagement?” The discussion of Twitter is contextualized by research on Twitter’s use in politics, both as a mobilizing force and potential to divide and mislead. Using intervals of time between 2014 – 2020, Twitter data containing #BlackLivesMatter is collected and analyzed. The discussion of findings centers around the role of performative activism in social mobilization on twitter. The analysis shows patterns in the data that indicates performative activism can skew the real picture of civic engagement, which can impact the way in which public opinion affects future public policy and mobilization.
ContributorsTutelman, Laura (Author) / Voorhees, Matthew (Thesis director) / Kawski, Matthias (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05