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One aim of my PhD research is to empirically analyze the relation between emerging semantics of social media streams and social factors which may influence them. With the term social factors I refer to different types of social context features which can be extracted from social media stream messages, such as authors or recipients of a message.

What are these (social) factors and why are they interesting?

My intuition is that an approach which simultaneously analyzes the content of social media stream messages as well as the directed social network in which the content is shared, may outperform traditional text-based semantic analysis methods, such as LSI or LDA. Therefore, I first need to identify the social factors which a social semantic analysis approach may take into account.

This is an uncomplete list of (social) factors, which may potentially influence emerging semantics of social media streams and may potentially help to better understand the meaning of message shared on a social media stream:

1) Composition of authors (who shared this content? How social diverse are the authors? How balanced is their distribution? How semantically and social similar are they? What do they have in common? How do authors change over time?)

2) Composition of audience (who consumes the content? How social diverse are the audience? How balanced is the  distribution of audience-users? How semantically and social similar are they? What do they have in common? How does the audience change over time?)

Note: We can differ between different audiences, e.g. an author’s cognitive audience (who does the author thinks they read his content) or an author’s most likely audience (who is most likely to see an author’s content)

3) Composition of recipients (who receives the content? How social diverse are the recipients? How balanced is their distribution? How semantically and social similar are they? What do they have in common? How do the recipients change over time?)

4) Social view on time (When is the content shared? What do others usually do at this time?)

5) Social view on location (Where is the content shared? What do others usually do at this location?)

If you can think of other factors, please drop me a line.