DISCOVERING POLITICAL TOPICS IN FACEBOOK DISCUSSION THREADS WITH GRAPH CONTEXTUALIZATION

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Zhang, Yilin; Poux-Berthe, Marie; Wells, Chris; Koc-Michalska, Karolina; Rohe, Karl
• 署名单位: University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; Audencia; Boston University
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF APPLIED STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1932-6157
• DOI: 10.1214/18-AOAS1191
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 1096-1123
• 关键词: Social networks; twitter; MODEL

摘要

We propose a graph contextualization method, pairGraphText, to study political engagement on Facebook during the 2012 French presidential election. It is a spectral algorithm that contextualizes graph data with text data for online discussion thread. In particular, we examine the Facebook posts of the eight leading candidates and the comments beneath these posts. We find evidence of both (i) candidate-centered structure, where citizens primarily comment on the wall of one candidate and (ii) issue-centered structure (i.e., on political topics), where citizens' attention and expression is primarily directed toward a specific set of issues (e.g., economics, immigration, etc). To identify issue-centered structure, we develop pairGraphText, to analyze a network with high-dimensional features on the interactions (i.e., text). This technique scales to hundreds of thousands of nodes and thousands of unique words. In the Facebook data, spectral clustering without the contextualizing text information finds a mixture of (i) candidate and (ii) issue clusters. The contextualized information with text data helps to separate these two structures. We conclude by showing that the novel methodology is consistent under a statistical model.