{"title":"Reconstructing and Analyzing the Transnational Human Trafficking Network","authors":"Mitchell Goist, T. H. Chen, C. Boylan","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3342879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342879","url":null,"abstract":"Human trafficking is a global problem which impacts a countless number of individuals every year. In this project, we demonstrate how machine learning techniques and qualitative reports can be used to generate new valuable quantitative information on human trafficking. Our approach generates original data, which we release publicly, on the directed trafficking relationship between countries that can be used to reconstruct the global transnational human trafficking network. Using this new data and statistical network analysis, we identify the most influential countries in the network and analyze how different factors and network structures influence transnational trafficking. Most importantly, our methods and data can be employed by policymakers, non-governmental organizations, and researchers to help combat the problem of human trafficking.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116690701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Collecting Representative Social Media Samples from a Search Engine by Adaptive Query Generation","authors":"Virgile Landeiro, A. Culotta","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3342924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342924","url":null,"abstract":"Studies in computational social science often require collecting data about users via a search engine interface: a list of keywords is provided as a query to the interface and documents matching this query are returned. The validity of a study will hence critically depend on the representativeness of the data returned by the search engine. In this paper, we develop a multi-objective approach to build queries yielding documents that are both relevant to the study and representative of the larger population of documents. We then specify measures to evaluate the relevance and the representativeness of documents retrieved by a query system. Using these measures, we experiment on three real-world datasets and show that our method outperforms baselines commonly used to solve this data collection problem.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116798816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multi-Factor Congressional Vote Prediction","authors":"Hamid Karimi, Tyler Derr, Aaron Brookhouse, Jiliang Tang","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3342884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342884","url":null,"abstract":"In recent times we have seen a trend of having the ideologies of the two dominant political parties in the U.S. growing further and further apart. Simultaneously we have entered the age of big data raising enormous interest in computational approaches to solve problems in many domains such as political elections. However, an overlooked problem lies in predicting what happens once our elected officials take office, more specifically, predicting the congressional votes, which are perhaps the most influential decisions being made in the U.S. This, nevertheless, is far from a trivial task, since the congressional system is highly complex and heavily influenced by both ideological and social factors. Thus, dedicated efforts are required to first effectively identify and represent these factors, then furthermore capture the interactions between them. To this end, we proposed a robust end-to-end framework Multi-Factor Congressional Vote Prediction (MFCVP) that defines and encodes features from indicative ideological factors while also extracting novel social features. This allows for a principled expressive representation of the complex system, which ultimately leads to MFCVP making accurate vote predictions. Experimental results on a dataset from the U.S. House of Representatives shows the superiority of MFCVP to several representatives approaches when predicting votes for individual representatives and also the overall outcome of the bill voted on. Finally, we perform a factor analysis to understand the effectiveness and interplay between the different factors.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"222 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120854561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Zhang, Bo Ni, Qiyu Zhi, Thomas Plummer, Qi Li, Hao Zheng, Qingkai Zeng, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
{"title":"Through The Eyes of A Poet: Classical Poetry Recommendation with Visual Input on Social Media","authors":"D. Zhang, Bo Ni, Qiyu Zhi, Thomas Plummer, Qi Li, Hao Zheng, Qingkai Zeng, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3342885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342885","url":null,"abstract":"With the increasing popularity of portable devices with cameras (e.g., smartphones and tablets) and ubiquitous Internet connectivity, travelers can share their instant experience during the travel by posting photos they took to social media platforms. In this paper, we present a new image-driven poetry recommender system that takes a traveler's photo as input and recommends classical poems that can enrich the photo with aesthetically pleasing quotes from the poems. Three critical challenges exist to solve this new problem: i) how to extract the implicit artistic conception embedded in both poems and images? ii) How to identify the salient objects in the image without knowing the creator's intent? iii) How to accommodate the diverse user perceptions of the image and make a diversified poetry recommendation? The proposed iPoemRec system jointly addresses the above challenges by developing heterogeneous information network and neural embedding techniques. Evaluation results from real-world datasets and a user study demonstrate that our system can recommend highly relevant classical poems for a given photo and receive significantly higher user ratings compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116599138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evaluation of Extremist Cohesion in a Darknet Forum Using ERGM and LDA","authors":"Mohammed Rashed, J. Piorkowski, I. McCulloh","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3343532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3343532","url":null,"abstract":"ISIS and similar extremist communities are increasingly using forums in the darknet to connect with each other and spread news and propaganda. In this paper, we attempt to understand their network in an online forum by using descriptive statistics, an exponential random graph model (ERGM) and Topic Modeling. Our analysis shows how the cohesion between active members forms and grows over time and under certain thread topics. We find that the top attendants of the forum have high centrality measures and other attributes of influencers.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128704097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Do Yeon Kim, Xiaohan Li, Sheng Wang, Yunying Zhuo, R. Lee
{"title":"Topic Enhanced Word Embedding for Toxic Content Detection in Q&A Sites","authors":"Do Yeon Kim, Xiaohan Li, Sheng Wang, Yunying Zhuo, R. Lee","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3345332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3345332","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly, users are adopting community question-and-answer (Q&A) sites to exchange information. Detecting and eliminating toxic and divisive content in these Q&A sites are paramount tasks to ensure a safe and constructive environment for the users. Insincere question, which is founded upon false premises, is one type of toxic content in Q&A sites. In this paper, we proposed a novel deep learning framework enhanced pre-trained word embeddings with topical information for insincere question classification. We evaluated our proposed framework on a large real-world dataset from Quora Q&A site and showed that the topically enhanced word embedding is able to achieve better results in toxic content classification. An empirical study was also conducted to analyze the topics of the insincere questions on Quora, and we found that topics on “religion”, “gender” and ‘'politics'’ has a higher proportion of insincere questions.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128963986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building a Task Blacklist for Online Social Platforms","authors":"Trang Ha, Quyen Hoang, Kyumin Lee","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3343705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3343705","url":null,"abstract":"Recently, the use of crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) has boomed because of their flexible and cost-effective nature, which benefits both requestors and workers. However, some requestors misused power of the crowdsourcing platforms by creating malicious tasks, which targeted manipulating search results, leaving fake reviews, etc. Crowdsourced manipulation reduces the quality of online social media, and threatens the social values and security of the cyberspace as a whole. To help solve this problem, we build a classification model which filters out malicious campaigns from a large number of campaigns crawled from several popular crowdsourcing platforms. We then build a task blacklist web service, which provides users with a keyword-based search so that they can understand, moderate and eliminate potential malicious campaigns from the Web.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130649751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Detection of Topical Influence in Social Networks via Granger-Causal Inference: A Twitter Case Study","authors":"Jan Hauffa, Wolfgang Bräu, Georg Groh","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3345024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3345024","url":null,"abstract":"With the ever-increasing importance of computer-mediated communication in our everyday life, understanding the effects of social influence in online social networks has become a necessity. In this work, we argue that cascade models of information diffusion do not adequately capture attitude change, which we consider to be an essential element of social influence. To address this concern, we propose a topical model of social influence and attempt to establish a connection between influence and Granger-causal effects on a theoretical and empirical level. While our analysis of a social media dataset finds effects that are consistent with our model of social influence, evidence suggests that these effects can be attributed largely to external confounders. The dominance of external influencers, including mass media, over peer influence raises new questions about the correspondence between objectively measurable information diffusion and social influence as perceived by human observers.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121576887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Suhansanu Kumar, Heting Gao, Changyu Wang, K. Chang, H. Sundaram
{"title":"Hierarchical Multi-Armed Bandits for Discovering Hidden Populations","authors":"Suhansanu Kumar, Heting Gao, Changyu Wang, K. Chang, H. Sundaram","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3342880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342880","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a novel algorithm to discover hidden individuals in a social network. The problem is increasingly important for social scientists as the populations (e.g., individuals with mental illness) that they study converse online. Since these populations do not use the category (e.g., mental illness) to self-describe, directly querying with text is non-trivial. To by-pass the limitations of network and query re-writing frameworks, we focus on identifying hidden populations through attributed search. We propose a hierarchical Multi-Arm Bandit (DT-TMP) sampler that uses a decision tree coupled with reinforcement learning to query the combinatorial attributed search space by exploring and expanding along high yielding decision-tree branches. A comprehensive set of experiments over a suite of twelve sampling tasks on three online web platforms, and three offline entity datasets reveals that DT-TMP outperforms all baseline samplers by upto a margin of 54% on Twitter and 48% on RateMDs. An extensive ablation study confirms DT-TMP's superior performance under different sampling scenarios.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124107309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Novel Methodology for Improving Election Poll Prediction Using Time-Aware Polling","authors":"Alexandru Topîrceanu, R. Precup","doi":"10.1145/3341161.3342900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3341161.3342900","url":null,"abstract":"Multiple poll forecasting solutions, based on statistics and economic indices, have been proposed over time, but, as we better understand diffusion phenomena, we know that temporal characteristics provide even more uncertainty. As such, current literature is not yet able to define truly reliable models for the evolution of political opinion, marketing preferences, or social unrest. Inspired by micro-scale opinion dynamics, we develop an original time-aware (TA) methodology which is able to improve the prediction of opinion distribution, by modeling opinion as a function which spikes up when opinion is expressed, and slowly dampens down otherwise. After a parametric analysis, we validate our TA method on survey data from the US presidential elections of 2012 and 2016. By comparing our time-aware method (TA) with classic survey averaging (SA), and cumulative vote counting (CC), we find our method is substantially closer to the real election outcomes. On average, we measure that SA is 6.3% off, CC is 5.6% off, while TA is only 1.5% off from the final registered election outcomes; this difference translates into an ≈ 75% prediction improvement of our TA method. As our work falls in line with studies on the microscopic temporal dynamics of social networks, we find evidence of how macroscopic prediction can be improved using time-awareness.","PeriodicalId":403360,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124114166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}