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Topic dynamics in Weibo: a comprehensive study

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Abstract

The tremendous development of online social media has changed people’s life fundamentally in recent years. Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, has attracted more than 500 million users in less than 5 years and produces more than 100 million Chinese tweets everyday. In these massive tweets, different user interests and daily trends are reflected by different topics. To our best knowledge, a systematic investigation of topic dynamics in Weibo is still missing. Aiming at filling this vital gap, we try to comprehensively disclose the topic dynamics from the perspective of time, geography, demographics, emotion, retweeting and correlation. An incremental learning framework is first established to probe more than 200 million streaming tweets and an interaction network constituted by around 90,000 active users. Many interesting patterns are then revealed, which could provide insights for topic-related applications in online social media, such as user profiling, event detection, trend tracking or content recommendation.

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Notes

  1. http://statuscalendar.com.

  2. http://code.google.com/p/plda/.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NSFC (Grant No. 61421003) and the fund of the State Key Lab of Software Development Environment (Grant No. SKLSDE-2015ZX-05). Jichang Zhao was partially supported by the fund of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment (Grant No. SKLSDE-2015ZX-28) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. YWF-15-JGXY-011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, People’s Republic of China

    Rui Fan & Ke Xu

  2. School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, People’s Republic of China

    Jichang Zhao

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  1. Rui Fan
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  2. Jichang Zhao
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  3. Ke Xu
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Correspondence to Jichang Zhao.

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Fan, R., Zhao, J. & Xu, K. Topic dynamics in Weibo: a comprehensive study. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 5, 41 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-015-0282-0

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