Journal article
Identifying Implicit and Explicit Relationships Through User Activities in Social Media
International journal of electronic commerce, v 18(2)
01 Dec 2013
Abstract
Social commerce has emerged as a new paradigm of commerce due to the advancement and application of Web 2.0 technologies including social media sites. Social media sites provide a valuable opportunity for social interactions between electronic commerce consumers as well as between consumers and businesses. Although the number of users and interactions is large in social media, the social networks extracted from explicit user interactions are usually sparse. Hence, the result obtained through the analysis of the extracted network is not always useful because many potential ties in the social network are not captured by the explicit interactions between users. In this work, we propose a temporal analysis technique to identify implicit relationships that supplement the explicit relationships identified through the social media interaction functions. Our method is based on the homophily theory developed by McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook [31]. We have conducted experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the identified implicit relationships and the integration of implicit and explicit relationships. The results indicate that our proposed techniques are effective and achieve a higher accuracy. Our results prove the importance of implicit relationships in deriving complete online social networks that are the foundation for understanding online user communities and social network analysis. Our techniques can be applied to improve effectiveness of product and friend recommendation in social commerce.
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Details
- Title
- Identifying Implicit and Explicit Relationships Through User Activities in Social Media
- Creators
- Christopher C Yang - College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel UniversityXuning Tang - Drexel UniversityQizhi Dai - LeBow College of Business, Drexel UniversityHaodong Yang - College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel UniversityLing Jiang - College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University
- Publication Details
- International journal of electronic commerce, v 18(2)
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science; Decision Sciences (and Management Information Systems)
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000330138300004
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84898460821
- Other Identifier
- 991014878372104721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Business
- Computer Science, Software Engineering