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The social distributional hypothesis: a pragmatic proxy for homophily in online social networks

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Abstract

Applications of the Social Web are ubiquitous and have become an integral part of everyday life: Users make friends, for example, with the help of online social networks, share thoughts via Twitter, or collaboratively write articles in Wikipedia. All such interactions leave digital traces; thus, users participate in the creation of heterogeneous, distributed, collaborative data collections. In linguistics, the Distributional Hypothesis states that words with similar distributional characteristics tend to be semantically related, i.e., words which occur in similar contexts are assumed to have a similar meaning. Considering users as (social) entities, their distributional characteristics can be observed by collecting interactions in social web applications. Accordingly, we state the social distributional hypothesis: we presume, that users with similar interaction characteristics tend to be related. We conduct a series of experiments on social interaction networks from Twitter, Flickr, and BibSonomy and investigate the relatedness concerning the interactions, their frequency, and the specific interaction characteristics. The results indicate interrelations between structurally similarity of interaction characteristics and semantic relatedness of users, supporting the social distributional hypothesis.

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Notes

  1. http://data.gov.au/1277.

  2. http://www.flickr.com/services/api/.

  3. http://delicious.com/network/.

  4. http://www.bibsonomy.org/friends.

  5. Note: For privacy reasons a user may deactivate this feature.

  6. http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/ (November 2011).

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the Commune project funded by the Hertie foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

    Folke Mitzlaff, Martin Atzmueller & Gerd Stumme

  2. Data Mining and Information Retrieval Group, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany

    Andreas Hotho

Authors
  1. Folke Mitzlaff
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  2. Martin Atzmueller
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  3. Andreas Hotho
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  4. Gerd Stumme
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Correspondence to Folke Mitzlaff.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Social Systems as Complex Networks.

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Mitzlaff, F., Atzmueller, M., Hotho, A. et al. The social distributional hypothesis: a pragmatic proxy for homophily in online social networks. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 4, 216 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0216-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0216-2

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