Social Media Analysis: Present and Future

Matthew Hurst

Live Labs, Microsoft

Thesis

• Social media analysis tends to separate out content analysis and structure (link) analysis. A lot of accuracy in analysis is left on the table – it’s time for a theory of social media.

• Industry is focused on the relationship between the consumer and the consumed – a more general goal of business intelligence can help grow the space.

Social Media Analysis: Now

• Sentiment analysis (NLP)

• Topics (keyword analysis)

• Author analysis (text based)

• Community analysis (social network theory)

• Influence/ranking (link analysis)

CONTENT STRUCTURE

TIME

URL

THREADS

WORDS

PHRASES

FRAGMENTS

TOPICS

SENTIMENT COMMUNITY

INFLUENCE

INFLUENCE/AUTHORITY

Definitions

• Influence:– Intentionally or unintentionally affect the actions

or beliefs of the subject.

• Authority:– belief that X’s subjective statements in the area of

T are more likely to (be useful|be accurate|be true) than statements by others.

Application

• Engagement: locating key individuals

• Alerting: at what level of authority or influence do we need to act?

• Weighting: metrics within a system weighted by features of author.

Current Model

Current Model

• And so it went in the US media: silence, indifference, with a dash of perverse misinterpretation. Consider Michael Hirsh's laughably naive commentary that imagined Bush had already succeeded in nailing down SOFA, to the chagrin of Democrats.

• DailyKos – smintheus, Jun 15 2008

• Considerably more recently, a Time Magazine swamp denizen is shocked to find John McCain apparently suggesting that support for withdrawing from Iraq and opposition to The Surge is the same as not supporting the troops.

• BTC News, Jun 15 2008

• While the traditional media is slowly starting to take John McCain’s straight talking image with increasingly large grains of salt, his base isn’t quite ready to give up on their favorite son. Jonathan Alter’s bizarre defense of McCain after he was caught telling an outright lie, perfectly captures that reluctance[.]

• DailyKos – BarbinMD, Jun 15 2008

Subtle Links

• A citation can be described along the following dimensions:– Target: what is the citation intended to refer to?

The page, an entity mentioned on the page, the author, …?

– Rhetorical purpose: why does the author cite? Introduce a topic, support an argument, expand a discussion, …?

– Subjectivity: does the author cite in a positive way, a negative way?

New Model

Solutions

• Some initial research shows promise – this is a solvable problem.– Modeling Trust and Influence in the Blogosphere

Using Link Polarity, Anubhav Kale, Amit Karandikar, Pranam Kolari, Akshay Java, Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi, 2007

– Blog Link Classification, Justin Martineau, Matthew Hurst, 2008

• A solution will involve analysis of the text around the link.

SUBJECTIVE STATEMENTS

Subjectivity Research

Taxonomy of Subjectivity

Subjective Statement:<holder, <belief>, time>

The moon is made of green cheese..

Opinion:<holder, <prop, orientation>, time>

He should buy the Prius..

Sentiment:<holder, <target, orientation>, time>

I loved Raiders of the Lost Arc!.

What is Opinion?

• How are opinions formed and what causes them to be expressed?

• What are the qualities of opinions?– Invariant?– Latent?– Synthetic?

• What are the social/psychological aspects of opinion?– One expresses an opinion either with some

communicative intention, or opinions are implicit in other statements.

Current Approaches

• Text, not person, has opinion.

• Sentence or document level processing.

• Some advances in reference resolution.

Opinion Process

Impetus SynthesisExpression:

s

Interpretation:s’

Re-Expression:s’’

Transmission of Opinion

• John said that this is a great restaurant: do we trust John? Is he an authority? Does he have influence?

• I’ve heard that this is a great restaurant: from whom? Several trusted sources?

• This is a great restaurant: have you experienced it yourself?

Content and Structure

• Opinions surface as statements

• There is social – structural – context to the generation and performance of these statements

• Statements are transmitted through the network.

COMMUNITY

BELIEFS PERSONALITY

INFLUENCE

AUTHORITY

THEORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA

COMMUNITY

BELIEFS PERSONALITY

INFLUENCE

AUTHORITY

WORDS

PHRASES

FRAGMENTS

URL

THREADS

Social Media Analysis 2.0

Summary

• Content (e.g. subjectivity) and structure (e.g. influence) need to be considered in conjunction to provide accurate analyses of social media data.

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS NEXT

Social Media Analysis 2.0

• Current systems measure the relationship between the consumer and the consumed.

• Current applications are used by marketing departments, brand managers, etc.

PRODUCT

REPORT

Actionability

• Requires modeling of business process– Need to understand who can take action when

• Requires modeling of business domain– Product definition

– Production process

PRODUCT

C1 C2 C3

SUPPLIERLOCATION

MATERIALS

REPORT

REPORT

REPORT

REPORT

Company I work for

Nokia 891

Microsoft 23, 800

Google 12, 100

Virgin Atlantic 111

Apple 5, 760

Samsung 1, 370

Dell 7, 860

Conclusions

• Progress in social media theory required to advance the state of the art for analytics.

• Richer domain modeling will lead to larger markets for social media analysis.