Xavier Llorà » Projects

Analyzing Trends in the Blogosphere Using Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools

Xavier — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:23:28 +0000

by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, David E. Goldberg (2006).
Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Mining (ICWSM 2007). Also as IlliGAL TR. No. 2006026. Link to the PDF.

Abstract
The blogsphere is a valuable source of information. From simple topic analysis in the blogosphere—what’s hot—to harvesting and analyzing valuable market trends—what product and features are suggested—require a tight integration of computer- and human-based analysis capabilities. Computers can easily assist the processing filtering and visualizing relevant and key elements of the blogosphere, but coupling them with human evaluation and reasoning can provide the final steps to connect pieces of relevant information into better description map of the current trends of the blogosphere. An example of the need for such human-centered analysis was David R. Ellis’ film Snakes on a Plane (2006) which failed to properly translate blogosphere discussions into a successful commercial product—as a clear misalignment of both environments the blogsphere and the final targeted market. In this paper, we present some human-centered visualization and analysis tools that can help users to compare and reason synergies and misalignments revolving around a particular topic.

Delineating Topic and Discussant Transitions in Online Collaborative Environments

Xavier — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 18:26:10 +0000

by Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Xavier Llorà, and David E. Goldberg (2006).
Illinois Technical Report No. 2006025. Link to the PDF.

Abstract
In this paper, we propose some methodologies for delineating topic and discussant transitions in online collaborative environments, more precisely, focus group discussions for product conceptualization. First, we propose KEE (Key Elements Extraction) algorithm, an algorithm for simultaneously finding key terms and key persons in a discussion. Based on KEE algorithm, we propose approaches for analyzing two important factors of discussions: discussion dynamics and emerging social networks. Examining our approaches using actual network-based discussion data generated by real focus groups in a marketing environment, we report interesting results that demonstrate how our approaches could effectively discover knowledge in the discussions.

Adaptable Extraction of Key Elements from Weblogs

Xavier — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:27:24 +0000

by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, David E. Goldberg (2006).
Illinois Technical Report No. 2006024. Link to the PDF.

Abstract
This paper proposes AKEE (Adaptable Key Elements Extraction) algorithm for web-log (blog, for short) mining. AKEE enables us to identify significant information in various blog components (e.g., a blog post, a series of blog posts, a set of series of blog posts, etc.).

The new DISCUS site is up

Xavier — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:57:08 +0000

The new site is here! Besides moving it to WordPress, we have been working to engineer a site that will allow us to demonstrate some of the human-centered analytic technologies the DISCUS project has created. For each post, now you can analyze it with a single click using the links provided on the left-hand side. The first analytics tool released is based on KeyGraph techniques. Other DISCUS analysis techniques are already on the pipe and will reach the site soon.

We have not stopped at reengineering the DISCUS site. We have also created an extension for Firefox that allow you to analyze the web page you are currently viewing. All DISCUS capabilities integrated in your browser. The DISCUS Firefox extension adds a DISCUS toolbar, some entries on the tools menu and in the right-click contextual menu. Hope you find it useful. Following the site, this toolbar will also grow and incorporate new features and human-centered analytic tools.

Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools for the Blogosphere

Xavier — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:31:08 +0000

by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Michael Welge, David E. Goldberg (in press, 2007).
To apper in the Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference.Also as IlliGAL TR No. 2006023. Link to the PDF.

Abstract
Blogging has become a new and disruptive communication medium. Blogs have changed the way people and organizations express, interact, and—quite unforeseen—exercise influence. The digital nature of the blog media provides access to an always-expanding corpus of information. It would take more than a lifetime to read all the available blogs necessary to answer questions such as what were the more relevant plots suggested or what key concepts were managed by bloggers in their ideas. However, human-centered analysis and visualization techniques may help users navigate such enormous corpus. This paper presents human-centered analysis and visualization techniques for supporting innovation and creativity can help to identify relevant post portions and to visualize concept relations in the blogosphere.

Metadata, RDF, and the browsers

Xavier — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:31:02 +0000

Recently I have been playing on implementing some extension for Firefox. When I started working on it, I was not aware on how far they have taken the use of metadata—I blogged before on metadata stores here. Actually, now you can query RDF data sources, which contain information ranging from your browsing history or bookmarks—to mention a few. But what makes it more exiting is that when you are writing extensions you can use java script to get that information stored by the browser using the RDF interface to do something useful. For instance, DISCUS is using it to provide on-the-fly analytics for the current page currently viewing. DISCUS will soon release a demo version of such a toolbar. If you want to read more about it, I would recommend the XULplanet.com.

Evolving emotional prosody

Xavier — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:57:30 +0000

by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006).
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF.

Abstract
Emotion is expressed by prosodic cues, and this study uses the active interactive Genetic Algorithm to search a wide space for sad and angry parameters of intensity, F0, and duration in perceptual resynthesis experiments with users. This method avoids large recorded databases and is flexible for exploring prosodic emotion parameters. Solutions from multiple runs are analyzed graphically and statistically. Average results indicate parameter evolution by emotion, and appear best forsad speech. Solutions are quite successfully classified by CART, with duration as main predictor.

Finally I am back up

Xavier — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 10:23:09 +0000

Vacations were over quite a while ago, but things kept piling on my desk. Finally I succeeded clearing some big chunks of matters out of it. Enough that I could go to the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM 2006) conference in Philadelphia last Tuesday. The conference is held as part of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC 2006) . Yan Jin invited me to join the panel he organized on Intelligent Systems and Innovation. I had a great time joining the DTM people, very interesting work—if you are interested on innovation and creativity.

Metadata stores

Xavier — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:20:27 +0000

The DISCUS project has always supported that intuition that annotation capabilities are a must for knowledge and information exchange. For instance, imaging that you are analyzing the KeyGraph generated from a particular discussion (here you can find an example). You may want to enrich such graph with your analysis, comments, or related information. Basically, you want to add metadata to the KeyGraph. If such a capability is available, a whole new bunch of information will need to be efficiently stored to allow, not only fast and easy retrieval, but allow analysis of the added metadata.

The Kowari project is an Open Source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage, retrieval and analysis of metadata. It provides a simple query language to interact with the metastore (iTQL). If you are familiar with SQL the resemblance will help you get up to speed very fast. The design is oriented to efficiently manage large volume metadata. Informal tests from Joe Frutelle, a NCSA colleague, have convinced me that this metastore can be the way to go for storing the large volumes of metadata that annotation may produce in DISCUS.

DISCUS as open source code?

Xavier — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:06:35 +0000

Recently Jack Park from Iris Semantic Network left a comment asking, among other things, if DISCUS was going open source. This is an interesting question. DISCUS is currently under two patent pending processes. However, the current policies at NCSA, one of the DISCUS partners, is to push toward open source. We are currently finishing a first release of DISCUS International with support for English and Japanese. When it passes the release quality standards, some parts of DISCUS will be disseminated, may be as open source code. This is, however, an issue that needs to be ultimately discussed with the Office of Technology Management (the university office handling the DISCUS patent process).