Weaving Information Propagation: Modeling the Way Information Spreads in Document Collections

Abstract

Information usually spreads between people by the mean of textual documents. During such propagation, a piece of information can either remain the same or mutate. We propose to formulate information spread with a set of time-ordered document chains along which some information has likely been transmitted. This formulation is different from the usual graph view of a transmission process as it integrates a notion of lineage of the information. We also propose a way to construct a candidate set of document chains for the information propagation in a corpus of documents. We show that most of the chains have been judged as plausible by human experts.