Characterizing Online Social Media: Topic Inference and Information Propagation
Saed Rezayi
Committee: Reza Rejaie
Masters Thesis(Feb 2018)
Keywords: content propagation; online social networks; text mining; topic inference

Word-of-mouth communication is a well studied phenomenon in the literature and content propagation in OSNs is one of the forms of WOM mechanism that have been prevalent in recent years specially with the widespread surge of online communities and online social networks. The goal of this study is to investigate what factors contribute into the propagation of messages in Google+. To answer to this question a multidimensional study will be conducted. On one hand this question could be viewed as a natural language processing problem where topic or sentiment of posts cause message dissemination. On the other hand the propagation can be effect of graph properties i.e., popularity of message originators or activities of communities. Other aspects of this problem are time, external contents, and external events. All of these factors are studied carefully to find the most highly correlated attribute(s) in the propagation of posts.