Visual Analysis of Topic Competition on Social Media...Visual Analysis of Topic Competition on...

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Visual Analysis of Topic

Competition on Social Media

Yingcai Wu Microsoft Research Asia

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Multiple-Discipline Research

Visual Analytics

– Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Prof. Huamin Qu

– Microsoft Research Asia

Communication and Media Studies

– City University of Hong Kong

• Prof. Jianhua Zhu

– Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

• Prof. Taiquan Peng

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Agenda-Setting

“The ability of the news media to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda”

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Social Media

2011 Egyptian Revolution

– Americans paid little attention to the event

– “#jan25” spread quickly on Twitter

– Obama showed his support in a speech

– Media started to report the event

– The event became popular news worldwide

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Challenges

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Goals of This Work

In the context of social media

– Topic competition occur at a larger scale

To understand

– The dynamics of topic competition (agenda-setting)

– The involvement of opinion leaders (two-step flow of communication)

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Related Work

Focus on a single event/post

Google+ Ripples Whisper

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Impacts of the Study

Applications

– Marketing

– Political campaigns

– Customer relationship management

– Public relation/image

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Solution

A visual analysis framework

– to study agenda-setting effects on social media

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Data Analysis

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Simple Model Does Not Work

Why not the number of retweets/comments?

– It cannot characterize the complex dynamics of competition among topics on social media

The impacts of opinion leaders

Attention attraction v.s. distraction

– Previous models only care about attraction

– Distraction is often neglected

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Topic Competition Modeling

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Topic Competition Model

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Topic Transition Modeling

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Topic Transition Model

Soft matching approach

– Estimates the average trend of topical focus transition

Topic 1

Topic 2

Topic 3

Topic 1

Topic 2

Topic 3

t t+1

Non-linear least square optimization

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Output of Data Analysis

Three types of output information

– The competitiveness of each topic over time

– The impact exerted by an opinion leader group over time

– The trend of topic transition over time

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Design Rationalities

Design requirements

– A mechanism to facilitate detection of temporal correlation patterns

– A meaningful and readable integrated view

– A level-of-detail visualization

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Visual Design

Visualization system

– Timeline View

– Radial View

– Tweet View

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Timeline View (1/3)

Overall trend of the competiveness of topics

Timeline

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Timeline View (2/3)

Influences of opinion leaders

TimelineMedia

Political Figures

Grassroots

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Timeline View (3/3)

Trend of topic transition of opinion leaders

TimelineMedia

Political Figures

Grassroots

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Radial View (1/2)

Visual summary of tweets

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Radial View (2/2)

Pairwise competition between topics

SourceTarget

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Tweet View

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User Interactions

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Experiments

Data

– Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS)

• 3,201,119 tweets

• September 17, 2011 to November 25, 2011

– 2012 US presidential election Twitter Data

• 89,174,308 tweets

• May 01, 2012 to November 20, 2012

Experiments

– Model evaluation and two case studies

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U.S. 2012 Presidential Election

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Conclusion

A visual analysis system

– An expanded topic competition model

– A set of information visualization techniques for visualizing the temporal, complex relationships

– Two case studies to explore the complex dynamics of agenda-setting and topic competition on social media

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Huamin Qu, Dr. Shixia Liu

Dr. Jianhua Zhu, Dr. Taiquan Peng

Panpan Xu, Enxun Wei

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Thank you

Yingcai Wu (yingcai.wu@Microsoft.com)