In this work we study the coupled dynamics of social balance and opinion formation. We propose a model where agents form opinions under bounded confidence, but only considering the opinions of their friends. The signs of social ties -friendships and enmities- evolve seeking for social balance, taking into account how similar agents' opinions are. We consider both the case where opinions have on...

An important task in Business Intelligence (BI) applications is to gather and analyze scattered opinions about an entity such as a product, a brand or a company. Thanks to Web 2.0 technology which has enabled more and more people to freely express their opinions in real time, the Web has now become an extremely valuable source for analyzing people’s opinions. However, since the opinions are usu...

The signs of social relationship in balance theory is objective and undirected which cannot characterize participants’ bidirectional subjective opinions on social relationships. By redefining the signs with the bidirectional opinions according to homogeneity principle, we extend the balance theory by measuring the opinions with interactive language. Initial experimental results on Enron emails ...

Today very popular Web portal sites, social networking sites, online media sites, commerce sites, etc., provide platforms for millions of visitors to visit daily and express their opinions on a wide variety of subjects. The site operators strive to increase the number of visitors, and the visitors often make use of several means at their disposal to participate in the formation of collective op...

Opinions play a very important role for human beings. Whenever a decision has been taken, opinions of others are also considered. Nowadays millions of web-users express their opinions about many topics through blogs, chats and social networks. Businesses and organizations always want to find consumer or public opinions about their products and services. In e-commerce and e-tourism, it is very i...

The goal of this study was to determine school counselors’ opinions concerning the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in school counseling practices. The participants were 61 school counselors (54 female, 7 male) who worked in middle (17), high (23), middle/high (19), and primary (2) schools. The mean age was 33.4 years. The Internet Usage Questionnaire was used to collect pa...

We consider the problem of truthfully sampling opinions of a population for statistical analysis purposes, such as estimating the population distribution of opinions. To obtain accurate results, the surveyor must incentivize individuals to report unbiased opinions. We present a rewarding scheme to elicit opinions that are representative of the population. In contrast with the related literature...

This opinion piece proposes that recent advances in opinion detection are limited in the extent to which they can detect important categories of opinion because they are not designed to capture some of the pragmatic aspects of opinion. A component of these is the perspective of the user of an opinion-mining system as to what an opinion really is, which is in itself a matter of opinion (metasubj...

The detection of false or true opinions about a product or service has become nowadays a very important problem. Recent studies show that up to 80 % of people have changed their final decision on the basis of opinions checked on the web. Some of these opinions may be false, positive in order to promote a product/service or negative to discredit it. To help solving this problem in this thesis is...