Social network users connect and interact with one another to fulfil different kinds of social and information needs. When interaction ceases between two users, we say that their tie becomes dormant. While there are different underlying reasons of dormant ties, it is important to find means to revive such ties so as to maintain vibrancy in the relationships. In this work, we thus focus on desig...

With the growing amount of social media contents, the user needs more accurate information that reflects his interests. We focus on deriving user’s profile and especially user’s interests, which are key elements to improve adaptive mechanisms in information systems (e.g. recommendation, customization). In this paper, we are interested in studying two approaches of user’s profile derivation from...

Searchers can face problems finding the information they seek. One reason for this is that they may have difficulty devising queries to express their information needs. In this article, we describe an approach that uses unobtrusive monitoring of interaction to proactively support searchers. The approach chooses terms to better represent information needs by monitoring searcher interaction with ...

Expertise seeking is the activity of selecting people as sources for consultation about an information need. This review of 72 expertise-seeking papers shows that across a range of tasks and contexts people, in particular work-group colleagues and other strong ties, are among the most frequently used sources. Studies repeatedly show the influence of the social network – of friendships and perso...

With the rise of social media, writings by ordinary people are becoming increasingly available for linguistic analysis. Such analyses offer great opportunities to identify individual users’ needs from user-generated content, so that better tailored products or services can be recommended. Literature suggests that several types of human needs are universal and directly influence consumer purchas...

by GARY BREWTON New registration procedures requiring students to sign up f o r s p r i n g c o u r s e s b y November 18 have been put i n t o e f f e c t t o i m p r o v e e s t i m a t e s on the size of classes. Each student is required to turn in by next Tuesday a mark-sense form signed by his advisor and listing prospective courses. He will have the option to drop and add courses without ...

This paper examines social media use after a tragic disaster in a rural community in the United States—the 2014 Oso Landslide. Drawing upon interviews with community members and digital traces from multiple platforms, we explore how affected locals, government responders and journalists utilized a broad range of social media in their work—assembling different platforms to meet the information n...

Network and linked data have become quite prevalent in recent years because of the ubiquity of the web and social media applications, which are inherently network oriented. Such networks are massive, dynamic, contain a lot of content, and may evolve over time in terms of the underlying structure. In this paper, we will study the problem of dynamic link inference in temporal and heterogeneous in...

As document collections grow larger, the information needs and relevance judgments in a test collection must be well-chosen within a limited budget to give the most reliable and robust evaluation results. In this work we analyze a sample of queries categorized by length and corpus-appropriateness to determine the right proportion needed to distinguish between systems. We also analyze the approp...