Stephen R. Poteet

TALISON - Tensor analysis of social media data

With the growth in social media, online forums have become major sources of data for social network analysis and a major research area in data analytics. However, many aspects of social networks have not been addressed fully, if at all. First, there is the need to capture various parts of the content of the exchanges, for example, bare text and hashtags, which constitute some of the major features of social media networks. Second, as in all social networks, there are many different types of relationships; for example, “following” and “friend” relationships, as well as relationships defined in terms of how users interact with one another such as replying, quoting, retweeting, and mentioning. Finally, an important aspect of analysis of social networks is temporal dynamics and topic evolution. We offer an analysis of Twitter data using tensors which can incorporate all of these different aspects in a single representation and both identify salient events and distinguish important views of these events.