Abstract
Several studies have shown that discourse and social relationships are intertwined and co-evolve. However, we lack theoretical models to explain the phenomenon. Inspired by recent work in ecology, we propose to model socio-semantic networks as an interaction between two intermingled data generating processes: a social community process and a document-based process. We consider the link between semantic and social ties as analogous to the interactions found in pollination networks whereby agents visit hidden topics in a similar way that insects visit specific plants for pollination. We use the ENRON socio-semantic email network to investigate if it exhibits properties that characterize mutualistic networks, namely moderate connectance, heterogeneous degree distribution, moderate modularity and high nestedness. To do so, we build a plant-pollinator matrix where “insect species” are communities detected via block modelling, “plant species” are latent topics detected with topic modelling, and the interaction between the two is the total number of visits a community makes to specific topics. Our results show that the ENRON socio-semantic interaction matrix respects the aforementioned criteria of mutualism paving the way for the development of a relevant framework to better understand the dynamic of human socio-semantic interactions.
Highlights
Several studies have shown that discourse and social relationships are intertwined and co-evolve
We investigate the socio-semantic network of ENRON from March 1999 to February 2002
The social dimension of ENRON corresponds to email exchanges between pairs of core employees, that is, employees who saw their mailboxes publicly released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Summary
Several studies have shown that discourse and social relationships are intertwined and co-evolve. A more complex and quite frequent construction of such networks is the addition of social relationships such as friendship or work relation14, influence[15], co-citations or scientific collaborations[1,16] or twitter e xchanges[17] These studies have shown clear connections between the realm of the social and the semantic, whose connections allow for the identification of epistemic communities formed by connected agents sharing a set of discourse e lements[18,19]. We are still in need of frameworks to better understand the underlying drivers of this connection, and, notably to answer “concrete and contemporary questions on the existence of fragmentation and of possibly reinforcing socio-semantic clusters, often denoted as echo chambers”, in online public s paces[4,20] This issue connects with the homophily/contagion debate around information diffusion and adoption. Illustration, the radicalization of a person’s political or religious positions could be explained by the relationships he or she maintains
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