A framework for longitudinal influence measurement between communication content and social networks

Artificial intelligence has a long history of learning from domain problems ranging from chess to jeopardy. In this work, we look at a problem stemming from social science, namely, how do social relationships influence communication content and vice versa. The tools used to study communication content (content analysis) have rarely been combined with those used to study social relationships (social network analysis). Furthermore, there is even less work addressing the longitudinal characteristics of such a combination. This paper presents a general framework for measuring the dynamic bidirectional influence between communication content and social networks. The framework leverages the idea that knowledge about both kinds of networks can be represented using the same knowledge representation. In particular, through the use of Semantic Web standards, the extraction of networks is made easier. The framework is applied to two use-cases: online forum discussions and conference publications. The results provide a new perspective over the dynamics involving both social networks and communication content.