ICWSM Blog 2007

Videos for keynotes

ICWSM — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:08:00 +0000

danah boyd

Andrew Tomkins

Evan Williams

Thanks!

ICWSM — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:31:00 +0000

We just wanted to thank all the attendees/presenters/volunteers/sponsors again for making ICWSM a great conference.

We will slowly be filling up the blog and website with pictures, presentations and video (where available) so please keep an eye out on the blog.

For those that missed it, the best paper award went to "TagAssist: Automatic Tag Suggestion for Blog Posts," by Sanjay Sood, Sara Owsley, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum

See you all next year in Seattle.

Event Detection and Visualization for Social Text Streams

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:23:00 +0000

Qiankun Zhao and Prasenjit Mitra

In this paper, we propose to detect events from social text streams by exploring the content as well as the temporal, and social dimensions. We define the term event in the social text streams(e.g., blogs, emails, and Usenets) as a set of relations between social actors on a specific topic over a certain time period. We represent social text streams as multi-graphs, where each node represents a social actor and each edge represents a piece of text communication that connects two actors. The content and temporal associations within each text piece are embedded in the corresponding edge. Then, events are detected by combining text-based clustering, temporal segmentation, and graph cuts of social networks. Moreover, we provide a multi-dimensional visualization tool that visualizes the relations between different events along the three different dimensions. Experiments conducted with the Enron email dataset1 show the advantages of exploring the social and temporal dimensions along with content, and the usefulness of the visualization tool.

Short Paper

Intertemporal Topic Correlations in Online Media: A Comparative Study on Weblogs and News Websites

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:21:00 +0000

Jean-Philippe Cointet, Emmanuel Faure and Camille Roth

We address the issue of intertemporal topic correlations in a selection of online media consisting of political weblogs and press website content. We wish to investigate in which way various information sources may be correlated, therefore preceding and maybe influencing each other. We use hidden Markov modeling to exhibit dynamic relationships in topic occurrences between distinct groups of weblogs; thereby considering topic distributions over weblog groups as system states, looking for minimal causal states, and exhibiting their transition probabilities. Beyond behavioral correlations between some groups of blogs and online media, we also identify varied and richer types of inter-group patterns. In particular, using a very compact description, we could infer interpretations as to how diverse groups of blogs behave with respect to each other as regards raising and discussing issues.

Short Paper

Feeds That Matter: A Study of Bloglines Subscriptions

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:20:00 +0000

Akshay Java, Pranam Kolari, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi and Tim Oates

As the Blogosphere continues to grow, finding good quality feeds is becoming increasingly difficult. In this paper we present an analysis of the feeds subscribed by a set of publicly listed Bloglines users. Using the subscription information, we describe techniques to induce an intuitive set of topics for feeds and blogs. These topic categories, and their associated feeds, are key to a number of blog-related applications, including the compilation of a list of feeds that matter for a given topic. The site FTM! (Feeds That Matter) was implemented to help users browse and subscribe to an automatically generated catalog of popular feeds for different topics.

Full Paper

Monitoring RSS Feeds Based on User Browsing Pattern

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:18:00 +0000

Ka Cheung Sia, Junghoo Cho, Koji Hino, Yun Chi, Shenghuo Zhu and Belle Tseng

RSS has been widely used to disseminate information on the Web over the years. With the help of RSS feed readers, a user may subscribe to the feeds that are published by her favorite blogs, news channels, orWebsites, and access the most recent content from these information sources. However, when the size of the subscription list grows over time, it becomes less manageable for the user to catch up with the most up-to-date information. In this paper, we propose a Personal Information Manager that helps a user monitor the pool of information sources in her subscription list and recommends relevant articles based on her browsing history. In particular, in order for the manager to provide the most up-to-date content, we propose a retrieval scheduling algorithm that allocates limited system resources in an optimal way based on the user’s previous access pattern. Experiments show that our scheduling algorithm significantly improves the freshness of content when compared to other scheduling algorithms which do not take into account a user’s behavior.

Full Paper

Using Tags and Clustering to Identify Topic-Relevant Blogs

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:55:00 +0000

Conor Hayes and Paolo Avesani

The Web has experienced an exponential growth in the use of weblogs or blogs. Blog entries are generally organised using tags, informally defined labels which are increasingly being proposed as a 'grassroots’ answer to SemanticWeb standards. Despite this, tags have been shown to be weak at partitioning blog data. In this paper, we demonstrate how tags provide useful, discriminating information where the blog corpus is initially partitioned using a conventional clustering technique. Using extensive empirical evaluation we demonstrate how tag cloud information within each cluster allows us to identify the most topic-relevant blogs in the cluster. We conclude that tags have a key auxiliary role in refining and confirming the information produced using typical knowledge discovery techniques.

Full Paper

Using Ontologies to Strengthen Folksonomies and Enrich Information Retrieval in Weblogs: Theoretical background and corporate use-case

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:54:00 +0000

Alexandre Passant

While free-tagging classification is widely used in social software implementations and especially in weblogs, it raises various issues regarding information retrieval. In this paper, we describe an approach that mixes folksonomies and semantic web technologies in order to solve some of these problems, and to enrich information retrieval capabilities among blog posts.
We first introduce the corporate context of the study and the issues we have faced that motivated our approach. Then, we argue how the use of domain ontologies combined with the SIOC vocabulary on the top of an existing folksonomy and weblogging platform offers a way to get rid of free-tagging classification flaws, and enhances information retrieval by suggesting related blog posts.
Aside of the theoretical background, this paper also focuses on implementation. We present experimental results of this approach through the example of add-ons to a corporate blogging platform and the associated semantic web search engine, that extensively uses RDF and other semantic web technologies to find appropriate information and suggest related posts.

Full Paper

Tags are not metadata, but "just more content" - to some people

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:42:00 +0000

Bettina Berendt and Christoph Hanser

The authoring of tags -- unlike the authoring of traditional metadata -- is highly popular among users. This harbours unprecedented opportunities for organizing content. However, tags are still poorly understood. What do they "mean", in what senses are they similar to or different from metadata? Different tags support different communities, but how exactly do they reflect the plurality of opinions,what is the relation to individual differences in authoring and reading? In this paper, we offer a definition and empirical evidence for the claim that "tags are not metadata, but just more content". The analysis rests on a multi-annotator classification of a blog corpus using the WordNet domain labels system (WND), the development of a system of text-classification methods using WordNet and WND, and a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of these classifications. We argue that the notion of a "gold standard" may be meaningless in social media, and we outline possible consequences for labelling and search-engine development.

Full Paper

TagAssist: Automatic Tag Suggestion for Blog Posts

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:41:00 +0000

Sanjay Sood, Sara Owsley, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum

In this paper, we describe a system called TagAssist that provides tag suggestions for new blog posts by utilizing existing tagged posts. The system is able to increase the quality of suggested tags by performing lossless compression over existing tag data. In addition, the system employs a set of metrics to evaluate the quality of a potential tag suggestion.

Coupled with the ability for users to manually add tags, TagAssist can ease the burden of tagging and increase the utility of retrieval and browsing systems built on top of tagging data.

Full Paper

An Activity-based Perspective of Collaborative Tagging

ICWSM — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:38:00 +0000

Shreeharsh Kelkar, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann

Collaborative tagging offers an interesting framework for studying online activity as users, topics (tags), and resources (bookmarks) get associated with each other through a folksonomy. In this paper, we consider an activity-based perspective of collaborative tagging where activity is defined as the act of associating a tag with a bookmark by a user. The perspective categorizes activities based on two defined measures: intensity and spread, which indicate the level and range, respectively, of the tagging activity, measured for both users and tags. Our block-model perspective juxtaposes two subperspectives: (i) A user perspective that captures the activity of users across different tags and, (ii) A tag perspective that captures the activity in tags across different users. This juxtaposition can provide an insight into different communities of users and tags. It has applications in identifying trends and types of interests in web communities as well as expertise, staffing needs and knowledge gaps in enterprise communities. Results obtained by analyzing data from a commercial tagging service offer interesting case studies.

Full Paper

Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:03:00 +0000

Noor Ali-Hasan and Lada Adamic

Blogs, regularly updated online journals, allow people to quickly and easily create and share online content. Most bloggers write about their everyday lives and generally have a small audience of regular readers. Readers interact with bloggers by contributing comments in response to specific blog posts. Moreover, readers of blogs are often bloggers themselves and acknowledge their favorite blogs by adding them to their blogrolls or linking to them in their posts. This paper presents a study of bloggers. online and real life relationships in three blog communities: Kuwait Blogs, Dallas/Fort Worth Blogs, and United Arab Emirates Blogs. Through a comparative analysis of the social network structures created by blogrolls and blog comments, we find different characteristics for different kinds of links. Our online survey of the three communities reveals that few of the blogging interactions reflect close offline relationships, and moreover that many online relationships were formed through blogging.

Full Paper

Finding Patterns in Blog Shapes and Blog Evolution

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:02:00 +0000

Mary McGlohon, Jure Leskovec, Christos Faloutsos, Matthew Hurst and Natalie Glance

Can we cluster blogs into types by considering their typical posting and linking behavior? How do blogs evolve over time? In this work we answer these questions, by providing several sets of blog and post features that can help distinguish between blogs. The first two sets of features focus on the topology of the cascades that the blogs are involved in, and the last set of features focuses on the temporal evolution, using chaotic and fractal ideas. We also propose to use PCA to reduce dimensionality, so that we can visualize the resulting clouds of points.
We run all our proposed tools on the icwsm dataset. Our findings are that (a) topology features can help us distinguish blogs, like 'humor' versus 'conservative' blogs (b) the temporal activity of blogs is very non-uniform and bursty but (c) surprisingly often, it is self-similar and thus can be compactly characterized by the so-called bias factor (the '80’ in a recursive 80-20 distribution).

Full Paper

On the Structure, Properties and Utility of Internal Corporate Blogs

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:01:00 +0000

Pranam Kolari, Tim Finin, Kelly Lyons, Yelena Yesha, Yaacov Yesha, Stephen Perelgut and Jen Hawkins

Weblogs, or blogs are radically changing the face of communication within enterprises. While at the minimum blogs empower employees to publicly voice opinion and share expertise, collectively they improve collaboration and enable internal business intelligence. Though the power of blogs within organizations is well accepted, their properties, structure and utility has not yet been formally analyzed. In this paper, we study the use of blogs within a large corporation to reveal some of the interesting characteristics. We propose new techniques to model the reach and impact of posts using the corporate hierarchy. We discuss how such a technique can feed into tools that identify the reach of blog posts, and the emergence of trends and experts within an organization.

Full Paper

How to Overcome Tiredness: Estimating Topic-Mood Associations

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:10:00 +0000

Krisztian Balog and Maarten de Rijke

We address the task of associating moods with a given topic, using a large set of mood-annotated blog posts. We argue that a simple frequency-based baseline does not suffice as it fails to capture topic-dependence. Instead, we propose three models based on language modeling techniques to accomplish the topic-mood association task. Based on anecdotal evidence and other considerations, including complexity and efficiency, we identify a clearly preferred model.

Short Paper

Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:09:00 +0000

Samuel D. Gosling, Sam Gaddis and Simine Vazire

Although still largely the province of teenagers and college students, Online Social-Networking Websites (OSNWs) like MySpace and Facebook are increasingly used by people in the 24- 54 year age range and many employers now use them to check out prospective employees. For many people, these websites have changed the dynamics of how individuals become acquainted. Indeed, viewing an individual’s profile on MySpace or Facebook now features early in the process of getting to know others, often serving as the very first exposure. But how accurate are the impressions based on OSNW profiles? Our previous research on personal websites suggests OSNW profiles should provide more information about targets than most other sources, including actually meeting the person. Here we examine impressions based on 133 Facebook profiles, comparing them with how the targets see themselves and are seen by close acquaintances. As in our previous research, results show generally strong patterns of convergence, although the accuracy correlations vary considerably across traits. Findings are discussed with regard to the increasing role of technology-borne social information in everyday interpersonal interactions

Short Paper

On Estimating The Geographic Distribution of Social Media

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:08:00 +0000

Matthew Hurst, Matthew Siegler and Natalie Glance

Many social media platforms allow the user to provide profile information. This information is generally presented in a semi-structured manner either on a profile page or on the weblog home page itself. This paper describes a novel wrapper induction method that extracts profile data. Our ultimate goal is to estimate the geographic distribution of weblog authors and to that end we provide an analysis of the location information discovered for each author in a large database of weblog posts.

Full Paper

Identifying more bloggers: Towards large scale personality classification of personal weblogs

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:07:00 +0000

Scott Nowson and Jon Oberlander

We report new results on the relatively novel task of automatic classification of blog author personality. Promisingly high classification accuracies have recently been reported for four important personality traits (Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). But the blog corpus used in that work required careful preparation, and was consequently quite small (with less than a hundred authors; and less than half a million words). Here, we provide an initial report on the classification accuracies that can be achieved when classifiers conditioned on the small corpus are applied to a larger, automatically-acquired blog corpus, using lower granularity personality data and substantially less manual preparation (with over a thousand bloggers, and approximately five million words). Predictably, results on the larger corpus are not as impressive as those on the smaller; nevertheless, they point the way forward for further work.

Full Paper

Of Men, Women, and Computers: Data-Driven Gender Modeling for Improved User Interfaces

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:04:00 +0000

Hugo Liu and Rada Mihalcea

Men and women have unique sensibilities for information, which can be tapped to create gender-sensitive user interfaces that appeal more specifically to each sex. Building on previous research in gender psychology and also in user modeling, we take a data-driven approach to understanding gender preferences by mining a large corpus of 150,000 weblog entries--half authored by men, half by women. This paper reports two kinds of contributions. First, we employ automatic language processing, semantic analysis, and reflexive ethnography to articulate gender preferences for several dimensions of gender space will provide valuable insight to user interface designers-- time, color, size, socialness, affect, and cravings. Second, we employ statistical gender models to build GENDERLENS--a novel intelligent news filtering system that customizes news based on the gender of its reader. A user evaluation found that GENDERLENS successfully predicted men and women’s preferences for news, with statistical significance for four out of five news genres tested.

Full Paper

Identifying Facets in Query-Biased Sets of Blog Posts

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:10:00 +0000

Wouter de Winter and Maarten de Rijke

We investigate the identification of facets of query-biased sets of blog posts. Given a set of blog posts relevant to a topic, we compare several methods for identifying facets of the topic in this set. Building on a clustering of a set of blog posts, we compare several cluster labeling methods, and find that a method that makes use of blog and blog search specific features outperforms other methods. We also present efficiencyimproving feature sets for clustering; our proposed method is fast enough to be deployed online.

Short Paper

Using Blog Properties to Improve Retrieval

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:47:00 +0000

Gilad Mishne

This paper describes three simple heuristics which improve opinion retrieval effectiveness by using blog-specific properties. Blog timestamps are used to increase the retrieval scores of blog posts published near the time of a significant event related to a query; an inexpensive approach to comment amount estimation is used to identify the level of opinion expressed in a post; and query-specific weights are used to change the importance of spam filtering for different types of queries. Overall, these methods, combined with non-blog-specific retrieval approaches, result in substantial improvements over state-of-the-art.

Short Paper

Visual Analysis of Weblog Content

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:30:00 +0000

Michelle L. Gregory, Deborah Payne, David McColgin, Nicolas Cramer and Douglas Love

In recent years, one of the advances of the World Wide Web is social media and one of the fastest growing aspects of social media is the blogosphere. Blogs make content creation easy and are highly accessible through web pages and syndication. With their growing influence, a need has arisen to be able to monitor the opinions and insight revealed within their content. In this paper we describe a technical approach for analyzing the content of blog data using a visual analytic tool, IN-SPIRE, developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. We highlight the capabilities of this tool that are particularly useful for information gathering from blog data.

Short Paper

Watching the Blogosphere: Knowledge Sharing in the Web 2.0

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:25:00 +0000

Ralf Klamma, Yiwei Cao and Marc Spaniol

Weblogs are new media forming the blogosphere. Blogs feature the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and social software. In this paper we discuss the use of blogs for knowledge management by identifying relevant knowledge work processes performed by bloggers. With a media theoretic framework we have analyzed functionalities of blog software and made a comparison of wellknown blog and community providers. Finally, we present the models needed to do cross-media community specific analysis of blog data for blogwatching software. This software enables the analysis and the prediction of knowledge sharing and spreading processes in the Web 2.0.

Full Paper

Modeling Trust and Influence in the Blogosphere Using Link Polarity

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:43:00 +0000

Anubhav Kale, Amit Karandikar, Pranam Kolari, Akshay Java, Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi

There is a growing interest in social network analysis to explore how communities and individuals spread influence. We describe techniques to find "like minded" blogs based on blog-to-blog link sentiment for a particular domain. Using simple sentiment detection techniques, we identify the polarity (positive, negative or neutral) of the text surrounding links that point from one blog post to another. We use trust propagation models to spread this sentiment from a subset of connected blogs to other blogs and deduce like-minded blogs in the blog graph. Our techniques demonstrate the potential of using polar links for more generic problems such as detecting trustworthy nodes in web graphs.

Short Paper

Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs

ICWSM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:42:00 +0000

Namrata Godbole, Manja Srinivasaiah and Steven Skiena

Newspapers and blogs express opinion of news entities (people, places, things) while reporting on recent events. We present a system that assigns scores indicating positive or negative opinion to each distinct entity in the text corpus. Our system consists of a sentiment identification phase, which associates expressed opinions with each relevant entity, and a sentiment aggregation and scoring phase, which scores each entity relative to others in the same class. Finally, we evaluate the significance of our scoring techniques over large corpus of news and blogs.

Short Paper