Online social capital: Mood, topical and psycholinguistic analysis

Thin Nguyen, Bo Dao, Dinh Phung, Svetha Venkatesh, Michael Berk

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Social media provides rich sources of personal information and community interaction which can be linked to aspect of mental health. In this paper we investigate manifest properties of textual messages, including latent topics, psycholin-guistic features, and authors' mood, of a large corpus of blog posts, to analyze the aspect of social capital in social media communities. Using data collected from Live Journal, we find that bloggers with lower social capital have fewer positive moods and more negative moods than those with higher social capital. It is also found that people with low social capital have more random mood swings over time than the people with high social capital. Significant differences are found between low and high social capital groups when characterized by a set of latent topics and psycholinguistic features derived from blogposts, suggesting discriminative features, proved to be useful for classification tasks. Good prediction is achieved when classifying among social capital groups using topic and linguistic features, with linguistic features are found to have greater predictive power than latent topics. The significance of our work lies in the importance of online social capital to potential construction of automatic healthcare monitoring systems. We further establish the link between mood and social capital in online communities, suggesting the foundation of new systems to monitor online mental well-being.

Original languageEnglish
Pages449-456
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2013
Externally publishedYes
EventInternational AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2013 - Cambridge, United States of America
Duration: 8 Jul 201311 Jul 2013
Conference number: 7th

Conference

ConferenceInternational AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2013
Abbreviated titleICWSM 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States of America
CityCambridge
Period8/07/1311/07/13

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