Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
Preface
ciology, and communication, featuring three
speakers. James W. Pennebaker’s talk will address the fact that most language-based computer programs analyze content-heavy words
(such as nouns and regular verbs) and throw
out “junk” words (such as pronouns, prepositions, and articles) to understand people’s
thinking, buying, searching, and other behaviors. He will present a series of recent studies
that point to the role of junk words in identifying personality, depression, status, honesty,
group cohesiveness, and other individual and
group behaviors. S. Craig Watkins’s talk will
show how young people’s participation in Facebook is actually more complex than the popular images and myths suggest. Drawing from
both survey data and in-depth interviews with
current college students and recent college
graduates Watkins considers how the use of
Facebook evolves across the young life-cycle.
Nicole Ellison’s talk will present research examining how people use the Internet to engage in
self-presentation, form and maintain relationships, and garner social capital benefits. The
talk will present two new streams of research:
one examining the ways in which people use
Facebook to connect with others and access social support and the other exploring online dating participants’ perceptions regarding acceptable and unacceptable misrepresentation in online dating profiles.
In recognition of the increasingly important
role of social media in government and reflecting this year’s conference location, this year’s
panel discussion addresses the topic of the role
of Social Media in the US Government. The
panel features Macon Phillips, the first White
House Director of New Media, Haym Hirsh, the
director of NSF’s Information and Intelligent
Systems Division (which is sponsoring research
in computational social media), and Don Burke
of the CIA, who was instrumental in the development of the Intellipedia.
This year, the papers are grouped into the
following sessions: Influence and Composition
in Social Networks, Dynamics and Diffusion in
Welcome to the fourth meeting of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media!
Research on social media sits at the intersection of several fields in the computer and social
sciences; so, since their inception, ICWSM conferences have had an interdisciplinary flavor.
This year, however, the conference has taken a
leap forward in integrating research from multiple fields. As you read through the program,
you will see that this is reflected not just in a
balance in papers from several fields but also
within the contributions themselves; many of
the papers and posters demonstrate excellence
in multiple areas. We think this increasing integration reflects a new level of maturity in the
field — investigators have moved beyond simply applying their trusted methods to socialmedia topics, and have started to implement
the ideas, approaches, and methods that are
best suited to their research questions. We are
optimistic that the marriage of approaches from
the computer and social sciences that is represented at this year’s conference will contribute
to continued synergistic collaborations among
the increasing number of disciplines associated
with research on social media.
This integrative approach to understanding
social media is exemplified in this year’s
keynote talks and invited symposia. Robert
Kraut’s keynote address, “Evidenced-based Design of Online Communities,” will focus on understanding what properties of online communities contribute to the success or failure of the
community as a whole. Similarly, Michael
Kearns’s keynote address, “Behavioral Experiments in Strategic Networks,” discusses humansubject experiments on strategic and economic
interactions in social networks. Both talks combine theoretical ideas from diverse areas (sociology, computer-supported collaboration, economics and game theory) with experimental
analysis of social interactions.
The invited symposium, “Research on Social
Media in the Social Sciences,” showcases research drawn from the fields of psychology, so-
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Social Networks, Microblogging, Analysis of Social Network Usage, and Sentiment and Language Analysis. The conference starts with a tutorial series. In keeping with the interdisciplinary balance of the conference, we have two
tutorials this year covering relevant foundational material from the areas of social psychology
and social network analysis. Cindy Chung and
Jamie Pennebaker will provide an overview of
text analytic methods for uncovering social and
psychological signals in language. Marc Smith
and Derek Hansen will review the fundamentals of social network analysis and their application to social media. Two additional tutorials
introduce relevant technologies supporting social media analysis. John Breslin and Alexandre
Passant will explore the opportunities offered
by the integration of social and semantic web
technologies. Jake Hofman will introduce the
latest approaches for conducting social network
analysis at scale with Hadoop. We are excited
about this year’s lineup of tutorial presenters
and look forward to the breadth of ideas they
will share.
ICWSM is committed to supporting the research community and encouraging research
with shared, available data sets. This year’s data
challenge has expanded on the 2009 ICWSM
Spinn3r Blog Dataset with annotations and indexes from last year’s data challenge workshop,
and is working to make yet more datasets available. A new dataset for 2010 is the ICWSM JDPA data contributed by J.D. Power and Associates. The dataset is a 330k-token corpus containing blog posts, product reviews, and press
releases with detailed, manual annotation for
mentions (named, nominal, pronominal), coreference, meronymy and sentiment (aggregate
sentiment per entity, sentiment expressions
with prior polarity, sentiment targeting relations, intensifiers, negators, neutralizers, committers). The corpus covers automotive and
consumer electronics domains. The workshop
takes place on the afternoon of the last day of
the conference. More details about the data set
and workshop are available in the frontmatter
of this proceedings.
Organizing a conference is a year-round
commitment — from the conference committee,
our AAAI colleagues and the program committee and reviewers. We also recognize, however,
that it is only with the passion and commitment
of those carrying out the research work and
submitting papers, posters and demos that our
meeting would take place at all, and so we reserve the greatest portion of our gratitude to
everyone who made a submission. As our conference grows, so does the quality of submissions and the quality of the final accepted papers. This year we accepted 25 papers out of
the 103 submitted. An additional 35 papers
were accepted as 4-page posters. Of the 25 submitted poster papers, 19 were accepted. Both
submitted demos were accepted.
The organizers would like to thank the program committee for their hard work in selecting this set of papers. Even more importantly,
we would like to thank the broader ICWSM
community for the excellent technical work that
was submitted. We are also grateful to Videolectures.net, which will once again provide video
coverage of the full conference, including the
tutorials, paper presentations and invited talks.
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– William W. Cohen, Chris Diehl,
Natalie Glance, Sam Gosling, Ashkay Java,
Marti Hearst, Matthew Hurst,
Nicolas Nicolov, & Ian Soboroff