This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highlycommitted, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each individual, located at a vertex of a directed graph, is characterized by her name, the list of people she is interacting with, her level of awareness, and her op...

Online customer reviews is considered as a significant informative resource which is useful for both potential customers and product manufacturers. In web pages, the reviews are written in natural language and are unstructured-free-texts scheme. The task of manually scanning through large amounts of review one by one is computational burden and is not practically implemented with respect to bus...

Recently there has been increasing interest in constructing general-purpose political opinion classifiers for applications in eRulemaking. This problem is generally modeled as a sentiment classification task in a new domain. However, the classification accuracy is not as good as that in other domains such as customer reviews. In this paper, we report the results of a series of experiments desig...

We study a simple continuous-time multi-agent system related to Krause’s model ofopinion dynamics: each agent holds a real value, and this value is continuously attracted by everyother value differing from it by less than 1, with an intensity proportional to the difference.We prove convergence to a set of clusters, with the agents in each cluster sharing a commonvalue, and provi...

We consider the classical problem of aggregating di¤erent individuals’probability assignments (opinions) over a -algebra of events. In practice, some events represent basic propositions, such as ‘it rains’or ‘CO2 emissions cause global warming’, while others represent combinations thereof, for instance disjunctions (unions) of basic events. It is plausible to treat the basic events as premises ...