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ERIS: An Approach Based on Community Boundaries to Assess Polarization in Online Social Networks

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Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 446))

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Abstract

Detection and characterization of polarization are of major interest in Social Network Analysis, especially to identify conflictual topics that animate the interactions between users. As gatekeepers of their community, users in the boundaries significantly contribute to its polarization. We propose ERIS, a formal graph approach relying on community boundaries and users’ interactions to compute two metrics: the community antagonism and the porosity of boundaries. These values assess the degree of opposition between communities and their aversion to external exposure, allowing an understanding of the overall polarization through the behaviors of the different communities. We also present an implementation based on matrix computations, freely available online. Our experiments show a significant improvement in terms of efficiency in comparison to existing solutions. Finally, we apply our proposal on real data harvested from Twitter with a case study about the vaccines and the COVID-19.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/AlexisGuyot/ERIS.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/rachel-bastos/boundaries-polarization.

  3. 3.

    See https://github.com/AlexisGuyot/ERIS/tree/main/experiment_complexity for more detailed explanations on the experiment.

  4. 4.

    https://projet-cocktail.fr/.

  5. 5.

    Quotes are retweets with additional comments.

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Acknowledgement

This work is supported by ISITE-BFC (ANR-15-IDEX-0003) coordinated by G. Brachotte, CIMEOS Laboratory (EA 4177), University of Burgundy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Bourgogne - EA 7534, University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Dijon, France

    Alexis Guyot, Annabelle Gillet, Éric Leclercq & Nadine Cullot

Authors
  1. Alexis Guyot
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  2. Annabelle Gillet
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  3. Éric Leclercq
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  4. Nadine Cullot
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexis Guyot .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Renata Guizzardi

  2. University of Geneva, CUI, Carouge, Switzerland

    Jolita Ralyté

  3. Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Xavier Franch

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Guyot, A., Gillet, A., Leclercq, É., Cullot, N. (2022). ERIS: An Approach Based on Community Boundaries to Assess Polarization in Online Social Networks. In: Guizzardi, R., Ralyté, J., Franch, X. (eds) Research Challenges in Information Science. RCIS 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 446. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-05759-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05760-1

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