In this paper, we propose a methodology quantifying temporal patterns of nonlinear hashtag time series. Our approach is based on an analogy between neuron spikes and hashtag diffusion. We adopt the local variation, originally developed to analyze local time delays in neuron spike trains. We show that the local variation successfully characterizes nonlinear features of hashtag spike trains such ...

High-volume hydraulic fracturing, a drilling simulation technique commonly referred to as "fracking," is a contested technology. In this article, we explore discourse over hydraulic fracturing and the shale industry on the social media platform Twitter during a period of heightened public contention regarding the application of the technology. We study the relative prominence of negative messag...

Political Hashtag Trends (PHT) is an analysis tool for political leftvs.-right polarization of Twitter hashtags. PHT computes a leaning for trending, political hashtags in a given week, giving insights into the polarizing U.S. American issues on Twitter. The leaning of a hashtag is derived in two steps. First, users retweeting a set of “seed users” with a known political leaning, such as Barack...

We present Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (DGCCA) – a method for learning nonlinear transformations of arbitrarily many views of data, such that the resulting transformations are maximally informative of each other. While methods for nonlinear two-view representation learning (Deep CCA, (Andrew et al., 2013)) and linear many-view representation learning (Generalized CCA (Horst,...

The uncontrolled usage of hashtags in social media makes them vary a lot in the quality of semantics and the frequency of usage. Such variations pose a challenge to the current approaches which capitalize on either the lexical semantics of a hashtag by using metadata or the contextual semantics of a hashtag by using the texts associated with a hashtag. This thesis presents a hybrid approach to ...

People’s interests and people’s social relationships are intuitively connected, but understanding their interplay and whether they can help predict each other has remained an open question. We examine the interface of two decisive structures forming the backbone of online social media: the graph structure of social networks — who connects with whom — and the set structure of topical affiliation...

Originated as a label to mark specific tweets, hashtags are increasingly used to convey messages that people like to see in the trending hashtags list. Complex noun phrases and even sentences can be turned into a hashtag. Breaking hashtags into their words is a challenging task due to the irregular and compact nature of the language used in Twitter. In this study, we investigate feature-based m...

Neuroanatomy is a difficult subject in medical education, with students often feeling worried and anxious before they have even started, potentially decreasing their engagement with the subject. At the University of Southampton, we incorporated the use of Twitter as a way of supporting students' learning on a neuroanatomy module to evaluate how it impacted upon their engagement and learning exp...

In recent years, the task of recommending hashtags for microblogs has been given increasing attention. Various methods have been proposed to study the problem from different aspects. However, most of the recent studies have not considered the differences in the types or uses of hashtags. In this paper, we introduce a novel nonparametric Bayesian method for this task. Based on the Dirichlet Proc...