No abstract

Social networks transmitting covert or sensitive information cannot use all ties for this purpose. Rather, they can only use a subset of ties that are strong enough to be "trusted". In this paper we consider transitivity as evidence of strong ties, requiring that each tie can only be used if the individuals on either end also share at least one other contact in common. We examine the effect of removing all non-transitive ties in two real social network data sets. We observe that although some individuals become disconnected, a giant connected component remains, with an average shortest path only slightly longer than that of the original network. We also evaluate the cost of forming transitive ties by deriving the conditions for the emergence and the size of the giant component in a random graph composed entirely of closed triads and the equivalent Erdös-Renyi random graph.

Understanding and estimating satisfaction with search engines is an important aspect of evaluating retrieval performance. Research to date has modeled and predicted search satisfaction on a binary scale, i.e., the searchers are either satisfied or dissatisfied with their search outcome. However, users' search experience is a complex construct and there are different degrees of satisfaction. As such, binary classification of satisfaction may be limiting. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the problem of understanding and predicting graded (multi-level) search satisfaction. We examine sessions mined from search engine logs, where searcher satisfaction was also assessed on multi-point scale by human annotators. Leveraging these search log data, we observe rich and nonmonotonous changes in search behavior in sessions with different degrees of satisfaction. The findings suggest that we should predict finer-grained satisfaction levels. To address this issue, we model search satisfaction using features indicating search outcome, search effort, and changes in both outcome and effort during a session. We show that our approach can predict subtle changes in search satisfaction more accurately than state-of-the-art methods, affording greater insight into search satisfaction. The strong performance of our models has implications for search providers seeking to accurately measure satisfaction with their services.

Online forums represent one type of social media that is particularly rich for studying human behavior in information seeking and diffusing. The way users join communities is a reflection of the changing and expanding of their interests toward information. In this paper, we study the patterns of user participation behavior, and the feature factors that influence such behavior on different forum datasets. We find that, despite the relative randomness and lesser commitment of structural relationships in online forums, users' community joining behaviors display some strong regularities. One particularly interesting observation is that the very weak relationships between users defined by online replies have similar diffusion curves as those of real friendships or co-authorships. We build social selection models, Bipartite Markov Random Field (BiMRF), to quantitatively evaluate the prediction performance of those feature factors and their relationships. Using these models, we show that some features carry supplementary information, and the effectiveness of different features vary in different types of forums. Moreover, the results of BiMRF with two-star configurations suggest that the feature of user similarity defined by frequency of communication or number of common friends is inadequate to predict grouping behavior, but adding node-level features can improve the fit of the model.

The question of citation behavior has always intrigued scientists from various disciplines. While general citation patterns have been widely studied in the literature we develop the notion of citation projection graphs by investigating the citations among the publications that a given paper cites. We investigate how patterns of citations vary between various scientific disciplines and how such patterns reflect the scientific impact of the paper. We find that idiosyncratic citation patterns are characteristic for low impact papers; while narrow, discipline-focused citation patterns are common for medium impact papers. Our results show that crossingcommunity, or bridging citation patters are high risk and high reward since such patterns are characteristic for both low and high impact papers. Last, we observe that recently citation networks are trending toward more bridging and interdisciplinary forms.