Abstract
In the last decades, temporal networks played a key role in modelling, understanding, and analysing the properties of dynamic systems where individuals and events vary in time. Of paramount importance is the representation and the analysis of Social Media, in particular Social Networks and Online Communities, through temporal networks, due to their intrinsic dynamism (social ties, online/offline status, users’ interactions, etc..). The identification of recurrent patterns in Online Communities, and in detail in Online Social Groups, is an important challenge which can reveal information concerning the structure of the social network, but also patterns of interactions, trending topics, and so on. Different works have already investigated the pattern detection in several scenarios by focusing mainly on identifying the occurrences of fixed and well known motifs (mostly, triads) or more flexible subgraphs. In this paper, we present the concept on the Incremental Communication Patterns, which is something in-between motifs, from which they inherit the meaningfulness of the identified structure, and subgraph, from which they inherit the possibility to be extended as needed. We formally define the Incremental Communication Patterns and exploit them to investigate the interaction patterns occurring in a real dataset consisting of 17 Online Social Groups taken from the list of Facebook groups. The results regarding our experimental analysis uncover interesting aspects of interactions patterns occurring in social groups and reveal that Incremental Communication Patterns are able to capture roles of the users within the groups.
Highlights
Online Social Networks [14] (OSNs) are cornerstones of today’s communication
We present experimental results about the detection of the Incremental Communication Patterns defined in sect. 4 in the scenario defined in Sect
For the sake of clarity, our goal is not to propose an efficient algorithm for the discovery of the Incremental Communication Patterns, rather we are interested in the study of the patterns, in the scenario of Online Social Groups (OSGs), where the communication between people is not yet studied in depth
Summary
Online Social Networks [14] (OSNs) are cornerstones of today’s communication. OSNs such as Facebook are nowadays used as the main communication channel by people because of their power and versatility [27]. It is very common to see people share their personal information, photos, etc., with friends and with strangers [15] This communication mechanism is relevant in virtual online communities, which represent one of the most important emerging feature of OSNs. a current trend of Social Media is to offer members the opportunity to establish and join groups of people online by creating virtual communities based on similar interests. In OSGs people have the chance to discuss ideas, doubts or interests with a big number of people that would be otherwise difficultly reachable in real life or with other traditional communication systems, that are mostly dedicated to private, one-to-one ways of messaging [10,12] These OSGs create environments where the information spreading tend to be even more effective [4,13,24] than the one seen in the word-of-mouth effect [1]. Even more than that, in contrast to how an OSN is usually used, where a user knows all of its contacts, users in OSGs do not necessarily know each other, and there is no way of limiting the interactions within the group
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