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https://sites.google.com/site/socialnlp2020/
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the hard work of many people. We would like to thank our colleagues and students at the University of Southern California and our colleagues at the NLP research group at the University of Ottawa. We would like to thank in particular Prof. Stan Szpakowicz from the University of Ottawa for his comments on the early draft of the book, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions for revisions and additions. We thank Prof. Graeme Hirst of the University of Toronto and Michael Morgan from Morgan & Claypool Publishers for their continuous encouragement.
Anna Atefeh Farzindar and Diana Inkpen
March 2020
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Social Media Analysis
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Social media is a phenomenon that has recently expanded throughout the world and quickly attracted billions of users. This form of electronic communication through social networking platforms allows users to generate its content and share it in various forms of information, personal words, pictures, audio, and videos. Therefore, social computing is formed as an emerging area of research and development that includes a wide range of topics such as Web semantics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, network analysis, and Big Data analytics.
Over the past few years, online social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc.) have revolutionized the way we communicate with individuals, groups, and communities, and have altered everyday practices [Boyd and Ellison, 2007].
The broad categories of social media platforms are: content-sharing sites, forums, blogs, and microblogs. On content sharing sites (such as Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube) people exchange information, messages, photos, videos, or other types of content. On Web user forums (such as StackOverflow, CNET forums, Apple Support) people post specialized information, questions, or answers. Blogs (such as Gizmodo, Mashable, Boing Boing, and many more) allow people to post messages and other content and to share information and opinions. Micro-blogs (such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, Tumblr) are limited to short texts for sharing information and opinions. The modalities of sharing content in order: posts; comments to posts; explicit or implicit connections to build social networks (friend connections, followers, etc.); cross-posts and user linking; social tagging; likes/favorites/starring/voting/rating/etc.; author information; and linking to user profile features.1 In Table 1.1, we list more details about social media platforms and their characteristics and types of content shared [Barbier et al., 2013].
Social media statistics for January 2014 have shown that Facebook has grown to more than 1 billion active users, adding more than 200 million users in a single year. Statista,2 the world’s largest statistics portal, announced the ranking for social networks based on the number of active users. As presented in Figure 1.1, the ranking shows that Qzone took second place with more than 600 million users. Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter completed the top 5 with 300 million, 259 million, and 232 million active users, respectively.
Table 1.1: Social media platforms and their characteristics
| Type | Characteristics | Examples |
| Social Networks | A social networking website allows the user to build a web page and connect with a friend or other acquaintance in order to share user-generated content. | MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, Google Plus+ |
| Blogs and Blog Comments | A blog is an online journal where the blogger can create the content and display it in reverse chronological order. Blogs are generally maintained by a person or a community. Blog comments are posts by users attached to blogs or online newspaper posts. | Huffington Post, Business Insider, Engadget, and online journals |
| Microblogs | A microblog is similar to a blog but has a limited content. | Twitter, Tumblr, Sina Weibo, Plurk |
| Forums | An online forum is a place for members to discuss a topic by posting messages. | Online Discussion Communities, phpBB Developer Forum, Raising Children Forum |
| Social Bookmarks | Services that allow users to save, organize, and search links to various websites, and to share their bookmarks of Web pages. | Delicious, Pinterest, Google Bookmarks |
| Wikis | These websites allow people to collaborate and add content or edit the information on a community-based database. | Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Wikihow |
| Social News | Social news encourage their community to submit news stories, or to vote on the content and share it. | Digg, Slashdot, Reddit |
| Media Sharing | A website that enables users to capture videos and pictures or upload and share with others. | YouTube, Flickr, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine |
Statista also provided the growth trend for both Facebook and LinkedIn, illustrated in Figure 1.2 and Figure 1.3, respectively. Figure 1.2 shows that Facebook, by reaching 845 million users at the end of 2011, totaled 1,228 million users by the end of 2013. As depicted in Figure 1.3, LinkedIn also reached 277 million users by the end of 2013, whereas it only had 145 million users at the end of 2011. Statista also calculated the annual income for both Facebook and LinkedIn, which in 2013 totalled US$7,872 and US$1,528 million, respectively.
Figure 1.1: Social networks ranked by the number of active users as of January 2014 (in millions) provided by Statista.
Figure 1.2: Number of monthly active Facebook users from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2014 (in millions) provided by Statista.
Social computing is an emerging field that focuses on modeling, analysis, and monitoring of social behavior on different media and platforms to produce intelligent applications. Social media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in efficient ways [Moturu, 2009]. Various social media platforms such as social networks, forums, blogs, and micro-blogs have recently evolved to ensure the connectivity, collaboration, and formation of virtual communities. While traditional media such as newspapers, television, and radio provide unidirectional communication from business to consumer, social media services have allowed
