Title
Users Are Known by the Company They Keep: Topic Models for Viewpoint Discovery in Social Networks.
Abstract
Social media platforms such as weblogs and social networking sites provide Internet users with an unprecedented means to express their opinions and debate on a wide range of issues. Concurrently with their growing importance in public communication, social media platforms may foster echo chambers and filter bubbles: homophily and content personalization lead users to be increasingly exposed to conforming opinions. There is therefore a need for unbiased systems able to identify and provide access to varied viewpoints. To address this task, we propose in this paper a novel unsupervised topic model, the Social Network Viewpoint Discovery Model (SNVDM). Given a specific issue (e.g., U.S. policy) as well as the text and social interactions from the users discussing this issue on a social networking site, SNVDM jointly identifies the issue's topics, the users' viewpoints, and the discourse pertaining to the different topics and viewpoints. In order to overcome the potential sparsity of the social network (i.e., some users interact with only a few other users), we propose an extension to SNVDM based on the Generalized Pólya Urn sampling scheme (SNVDM-GPU) to leverage "acquaintances of acquaintances" relationships. We benchmark the different proposed models against three baselines, namely TAM, SN-LDA, and VODUM, on a viewpoint clustering task using two real-world datasets. We thereby provide evidence that our model SNVDM and its extension SNVDM-GPU significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines, and we show that utilizing social interactions greatly improves viewpoint clustering performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3132847.3132897
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
Viewpoint Discovery, Topic Modeling, Social Networks
Data science,Data mining,Social network,Social media,Computer science,Viewpoints,Homophily,Topic model,Cluster analysis,The Internet,Personalization
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-4918-5
3
0.37
References 
Authors
30
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
thibaut thonet1192.44
Guillaume Cabanac219536.63
Mohand Boughanem3923109.00
Karen Pinel-Sauvagnat417524.64