ELFT HÍRADÓ

[StatFizSzeminar <statfiz AT glu.elte.hu>]

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               ELTE Institute of Physics
            SEMINARS IN STATISTICAL PHYSICS

            Wednesday, October 27, 2010, 11 am.



                   Eduardo G Altmann

          Max Planck Institute for the Physics 
               of Complex Systems, Dresden

  "Intermittent usage of words in online discussion groups"


Recent statistical investigations of e-mail exchange and social
networking websites revealed remarkable properties of collective human
behavior with an unprecedent quantitative precision. However, usually
these studies give little attention to the content of the exchanged
messages partially because of the difficulties in the treatment of
natural language, a complex dynamical system itself. In this talk I
will report on the statistical analysis of the usage of words in
Usenet discussion groups. Usenet groups provide records of spontaneous
communications spanning decades, including more than 100 million words
and thousands of users. We employ techniques from time series analysis
and statistical physics to quantify the intermitent usage of words in
time and the heterogeneous usage of words across users and topics. The
intermittency is shown to be well described by a Weibull distribution
of the recurrence time between usages of words, with a strong
dependency on the semantic type of the word. To quantify the
heterogeneity across users and topics we define a dissemination
coefficient obtained by comparing the actual number of users (or
topics) that used the word to a Poisson baseline model.  We show that
the user and topic dissemination coefficients provide independent
information about the usage of words and are negatively correlated
with the future frequency change of the word. The rise of Internet
slangs, products, and celebrities is also quantified and compared to
the behavior of "typical" words, showing how endogenous and exogenous
factors affect the popularity of topics in online groups.


               Room 2.54 -- Novobátzky hall

     1117 Budapest, Pázmány P. sétány 1/A (Northern Block)

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