Despite the increasing attention paid to the social interaction in online social networks, it is still not clear how social media users interact with each other, consume different content, and expand their social network. This study conceptualizes two types of user engagement (internal and external) and empirically examines the dynamics between user’s engagement, friends’ engagement, and networ...

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In this paper, we describe our participation in the INEX 2014 Social Book Search(SBS) Track Suggestion Task. We investigate the contribution of user-generated data and construct a social book search system based on several important techniques. We perform re-ranking on Galago searching results on enriched XML index by 11 different strategies and combine the results with learning to rank. We fin...

Using Web-based contents management systems such as Blog, an end user can easily publish User Generated Content (UGC). Although publishing of UGCs is easy, controlling access to them is a difficult problem for end users. Currently, most of Blog sites offer no access control mechanism, and even when it is available to users, it is not sufficient to control users who do not have an account at the...

Much of the early morphology and syntax of clause structure (until roughly age 3;0) can be described via the Optional Infinitive (OI) model (Wexler 1990, 1992, 1994), and recent versions of the theory incorporating the Unique Checking Constraint (UCC) (Wexler 1998) successfully explain variation in whether a language goes through the OI stage. The purpose of this paper is to apply the theory to...

The proliferation of media sharing and social networking websites has brought with it vast collections of site-specific user generated content. The result is a Social Networking Divide in which the concepts and structure common across different sites are hidden. The knowledge and structures from one social site are not adequately exploited to provide new information and resources to the same or...

BOTS is a socially multiplayer online game designed to teach students about introductory computer science concepts such as loops and functions. Using this game, I plan to explore the use of user-generated content (UGC) in game-based tutors, increasing replayability and, ideally, player engagement. BOTS has so far been used for work towards identifying what makes a level or puzzle in the game “g...

The increasing popularity of Web 2.0 has led to exponential growth of user-generated content in both volume and significance. One important type of user-generated content is the blog. Blogs encompass useful information (e.g., insightful product reviews and information-rich consumer communities) that could potentially be a “gold mine” for business intelligence, bringing great opportunities for b...

Since 1950, information flows have been in the centre of scientific research. Up until internet penetration in the late 90s, these studies were based over traditional offline social networks. Several observations in “offline” information flows studies, such as two-step flow of communication and the importance of weak ties, were verified in several “online” studies, showing that the diffused inf...

This paper develops a framework for studying the popularity dynamics of user-generated videos, presents a characterization of the popularity dynamics, and proposes a model that captures the key properties of these dynamics. We illustrate the biases that may be introduced in the analysis for some choices of the sampling technique used for collecting data; however, sampling from recently-uploaded...