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Topic formation and development: a core-group evolving process

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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed increased interests in topic detection and tracking (TDT). However, existing work mainly focuses on overall trend analysis, and is not developed for understanding the evolving process of topics. To this end, this paper aims to reveal the underlying process and reasons for topic formation and development (TFD). Along this line, based on community partitioning in social networks, a core-group model is proposed to explain the dynamics and to segment topic development. This model is inspired by the cell division mechanism in biology. Furthermore, according to the division phase and interphase in the life cycle of a core group, a topic is separated into four states including birth state, extending state, saturation state and shrinkage state. In this paper, we mainly focus our studies on scientific topic formation and development using the citation network structure among scientific papers. Experimental results on two real-world data sets show that the division of a core group brings on the generation of a new scientific topic. The results also reveal that the progress of an entire scientific topic is closely correlated to the growth of a core group during its interphase. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in several real-life scenarios.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Tieyun Qian, Qing Li & Phillip C. -Y. Sheu

  2. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Tieyun Qian

  3. Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Qing Li

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA

    Bing Liu

  5. MSIS Department, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Jersey, USA

    Hui Xiong

  6. College of Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA

    Jaideep Srivastava

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  1. Tieyun Qian
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  2. Qing Li
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  3. Bing Liu
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  6. Phillip C. -Y. Sheu
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Correspondence to Tieyun Qian.

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Qian, T., Li, Q., Liu, B. et al. Topic formation and development: a core-group evolving process. World Wide Web 17, 1343–1373 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0245-1

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