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My research ideas have recently been mainly about how we can characterize and exploit collective discourse.
So what is collective discourse?
With the growth of Web 2.0, millions of individuals involve in collective discourse. They participate in online discussions, share their opinions, and generate content about the same artifacts, objects, and news events in Web portals like amazon.com, epinions.com, imdb.com and so forth. This massive amount of text is mainly written on the Web by non-expert individuals with different perspectives, and yet exhibits accurate knowledge as a whole.
In social media, collective discourse is often a collective reaction to an event. A collective reaction to a well-defined subject emerges in response to an event (a movie release, a breaking story, a newly published paper) in the form of independent writings (movie reviews, news headlines, citation sentences) by many individuals.
A common characteristic of collective discourse, just like many other collective behaviors, is the diversity among individuals engaging in it. This diversity is emerges in form of diverse perspectives that different people have about the discussed topic.
The diversity of perspectives in non-expert contributions in collective discourse can be exploited to discover various aspects about a subject that are otherwise hard to unveil.
(Read More … )