Campaign Extraction from Large-Scale Social Media

Abstract

We study the problem of detecting coordinated free text campaigns in large-scale social media. These campaigns - ranging from coordinated spam messages to promotional and advertising campaigns to political astroturfing - are growing in significance and reach with the commensurate rise in massive-scale social systems. Specifically, we propose and evaluate a content-driven framework for effectively linking free text posts with common "talking points" and extracting campaigns from large-scale social media. Three of the salient features of the campaign extraction framework are: (i) first, we investigate graph mining techniques for isolating coherent campaigns from large message-based graphs; (ii) second, we conduct a comprehensive comparative study of text-based message correlation in message and user levels; and (iii) finally, we analyze temporal behaviors of various campaign types. Through an experimental study over millions of Twitter messages we identify five major types of campaigns - Spam, Promotion, Template, News, and Celebrity campaigns - and we show how these campaigns may be extracted with high precision and recall.

Biography

Kyumin Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. His primary research interests are in information quality and data analytics over large-scale networked information systems. Application areas are the Web, social media systems, mobile information systems, enterprise and healthcare networks, and other emerging distributed systems. During his Ph.D., he has interned twice - once at IBM Research-Almaden and once at eBay Research Labs. In addition to his research experience, he has two years of software development and engineering experience at NHN Corporation, which operates the most popular Internet portal and search engine, and the number one online game portal in South Korea. He received an M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, in 2007 and a B.S. double degree in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from Kyonggi University, South Korea, in 2005.