Assessing the role of participants in evolution of topic lifecycles on social networks

Abstract

Background: Topic lifecycle analysis on social networks aims to analyze and track how topics are born from user-generated content, and how they evolve. Twitter researchers have no agreed-upon definition of topics; topics on Twitter are typically derived in the form of (a) frequently used hashtags, or (b) keywords showing sudden trends of large occurrence in a short span of time (“bursty keywords”), or (c) concepts latent within the tweets that are grouped using variations of semantic clustering techniques. Methods: In the current paper, we jointly model the hashtags present and the semantic concepts embedded in the content, which in turn helps us identify hashtag groups that define a “topic”—a concept space—that are used by a large number of tweets. Results: We observe that different hashtags belonging to a given cluster are more prominent compared to the others, at different times. We further observe that the participation and influence levels of the different users play important roles in determining which hashtag would be more prominent than the others at given times. We thus observe topics to often morph from one to the other (via morphing of dominant hashtags representing the same semantic concept space), rather than becoming extinct outright, which is a novel insight about topic lifecycles. We further present novel observations about the role of users in determining the lifecycle of discussion topics on Twitter. Conclusions: We infer that topic lifecycles are governed by user interests, and not by user influence, which is a key observation made by our work.