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The social presence theory in social psychology suggests that computer-mediated online interactions are inferior to face-to-face, in-person interactions. Thus, it's important to organize social activities for online social network users to meet in person. In this paper, we consider the scenarios of organizing in person friend-making social activities via online social networks (OSNs) and formulate a new research problem, namely, Hop-bounded Maximum Group Friending (HMGF), that takes into consideration both existing friendships and the likelihood of new friend making in organization of the targeted in person friend-making social activities. To find a set of attendees for such social activities, HMGF is unique and challenging due to the interplay of the group size, the constraint on existing friendships, and the objective of maximizing the likelihood of friend making. We prove that HMGF is NP-Hard, and there exists no approximation algorithm for it unless $P=NP$ P = N P . We also provide an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the HMGF problem. The ILP formulation, which can be solved efficiently by a commercial solver to obtain the optimal solution for small HMGF instances, acts as a baseline approach for comparison in the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. We further propose an error-bounded approximation algorithm, MaxGF, to efficiently obtain the solutions very close to the optimal solutions. To boost the performance, we devise two graph-theoretical pruning strategies, namely Neighbor Pruning and Core Pruning, which can effectively avoid redundant graph explorations to improve the performance of HMGF. We also study HMGF on a class of special graphs, threshold graphs, which have properties very similar to many online social networks. We prove that MaxGF can obtain the optimal solution to HMGF on threshold graphs in polynomial time. We conduct a user study to validate our problem formulation and perform extensive experiments on real datasets to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The experimental results manifest that our proposed algorithms outperform the baselines, including the ILP formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosive growth in popularity of social networking leads to the problematic usage. An increasing number of social network mental disorders (SNMDs), such as Cyber-Relationship Addiction, Information Overload, and Net Compulsion, have been recently noted. Symptoms of these mental disorders are usually observed passively today, resulting in delayed clinical intervention. In this paper, we argue that mining online social behavior provides an opportunity to actively identify SNMDs at an early stage. It is challenging to detect SNMDs because the mental status cannot be directly observed from online social activity logs. Our approach, new and innovative to the practice of SNMD detection, does not rely on self-revealing of those mental factors via questionnaires in Psychology. Instead, we propose a machine learning framework, namely, Social Network Mental Disorder Detection (SNMDD), that exploits features extracted from social network data to accurately identify potential cases of SNMDs. We also exploit multi-source learning in SNMDD and propose a new SNMD-based Tensor Model (STM) to improve the accuracy. To increase the scalability of STM, we further improve the efficiency with performance guarantee. Our framework is evaluated via a user study with 3,126 online social network users. We conduct a feature analysis, and also apply SNMDD on large-scale datasets and analyze the characteristics of the three SNMD types. The results manifest that SNMDD is promising for identifying online social network users with potential SNMDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel text representation paradigm and a set of follow-up text representation models based on cognitive psychology theories. The intuition of our study is that the knowledge implied in a large collection of documents may improve the understanding of single documents. Based on cognitive psychology theories, we propose a general text enrichment framework, study the key factors to enable activation of implicit information, and develop new text representation methods to enrich text with the implicit information. Our study aims to mimic some aspects of human cognitive procedure in which given stimulant words serve to activate understanding implicit concepts. By incorporating human cognition into text representation, the proposed models advance existing studies by mining implicit information from given text and coordinating with most existing text representation approaches at the same time, which essentially bridges the gap between explicit and implicit information. Experiments on multiple tasks show that the implicit information activated by our proposed models matches human intuition and significantly improves the performance of the text mining tasks as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Psychological stress is threatening people’s health. It is non-trivial to detect stress timely for proactive care. With the popularity of social media, people are used to sharing their daily activities and interacting with friends on social media platforms, making it feasible to leverage online social network data for stress detection. In this paper, we find that users stress state is closely related to that of his/her friends in social media, and we employ a large-scale dataset from real-world social platforms to systematically study the correlation of users’ stress states and social interactions. We first define a set of stress-related textual, visual, and social attributes from various aspects, and then propose a novel hybrid model - a factor graph model combined with Convolutional Neural Network to leverage tweet content and social interaction information for stress detection. Experimental results show that the proposed model can improve the detection performance by 6-9 percent in F1-score. By further analyzing the social interaction data, we also discover several intriguing phenomena, i.e., the number of social structures of sparse connections (i.e., with no delta connections) of stressed users is around 14 percent higher than that of non-stressed users, indicating that the social structure of stressed users’ friends tend to be less connected and less complicated than that of non-stressed users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Exponential growth of information generated by online social networks demands effective and scalable recommender systems to give useful results. Traditional techniques become unqualified because they ignore social relation data; existing social recommendation approaches consider social network structure, but social contextual information has not been fully considered. It is significant and challenging to fuse social contextual factors which are derived from users’ motivation of social behaviors into social recommendation. In this paper, we investigate the social recommendation problem on the basis of psychology and sociology studies, which exhibit two important factors: individual preference and interpersonal influence. We first present the particular importance of these two factors in online behavior prediction. Then we propose a novel probabilistic matrix factorization method to fuse them in latent space. We further provide a scalable algorithm which can incrementally process the large scale data. We conduct experiments on both Facebook style bidirectional and Twitter style unidirectional social network data sets. The empirical results and analysis on these two large data sets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alias detection has been the significant subject being extensively studied for several domain applications, especially intelligence data analysis. Many preliminary methods rely on text-based measures, which are ineffective with false descriptions of terrorists' name, date-of-birth, and address. This barrier may be overcome through link information presented in relationships among objects of interests. Several numerical link-based similarity techniques have proven effective for identifying similar objects in the Internet and publication domains. However, as a result of exceptional cases with unduly high measure, these methods usually generate inaccurate similarity descriptions. Yet, they are either computationally inefficient or ineffective for alias detection with a single-property based model. This paper presents a novel orders-of-magnitude based similarity measure that integrates multiple link properties to refine the estimation process and derive semantic-rich similarity descriptions. The approach is based on order-of-magnitude reasoning with which the theory of fuzzy set is blended to provide quantitative semantics of descriptors and their unambiguous mathematical manipulation. With such explanatory formalism, analysts can validate the generated results and partly resolve the problem of false positives. It also allows coherent interpretation and communication within a decision-making group, using this computing-with-word capability. Its performance is evaluated over a terrorism-related data set, with further generalization over publication and email data collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]