Multi-Relational Characterization of Dynamic Social Network Communities

The emergence of the mediated social web – a distributed network of participants creating rich media content and engaging in interactive conversations through Internet-based communication technologies – has contributed to the evolution of powerful social, economic and cultural change. Online social network sites and blogs, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and LiveJournal, thrive due to their fundamental sense of ―community‖. The growth of online communities offers both opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners. Participation in online communities has been observed to influence people's behavior in diverse ways ranging from financial decision-making to political choices, suggesting the rich potential for diverse applications. However, although studies on the social web have been extensive, discovering communities from online social media remains challenging, due to the interdisciplinary nature of this subject. In this article, we present our recent work on characterization of communities in online social media using computational approaches grounded on the observations from social science.