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Publications

Publications by Álvaro Figueira

2016

An Approach to Relevancy Detection: contributions to the automatic detection of relevance in social networks

Authors
Figueira, A; Sandim, M; Fortuna, P;

Publication
NEW ADVANCES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGIES, VOL 1

Abstract
In this paper we analyze the information propagated through three social networks. Previous research has shown that most of the messages posted on Twitter are truthful, but the service is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors. In this paper we focus on the search for automatic methods for assessing the relevance of a given set of posts. We first retrieved from social networks, posts related to trending topics. Then, we categorize them as being news or as being conversational messages, and assessed their credibility. From the gained insights we used features to automatically assess whether a post is news or chat, and to level its credibility. Based on these two experiments we built an automatic classifier. The results from assessing our classifier, which categorizes posts as being relevant or not, lead to a high balanced accuracy, with the potential to be further enhanced.

2016

DISCOVERING SIMILAR ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES USING CLASSIFICATION AND CLUSTERING

Authors
Figueira, A; Oliveira, L;

Publication
INTED2016: 10TH INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE

Abstract
Organisations have been striving to account for the resources they've been allocating to Social Media integration and management, essentially because this integration has been occurring without a previously designed content strategy, which will foster the desired fan engagement. In order to establish a comparison of social media strategies between HEIs, we developed a seven category model, encompassing the fundamental communication areas of focus for higher education service providers. Then, we performed a classification of these HEI posts in Facebook, according to our model. For this step, we used six of the most promising, and prominent, classifiers to obtain a predicted category for each post. Combining all posts from each HEI according to the model we get the HEI's editorial strategy. By clustering the overall social media strategies and corresponding response rate we discover the sector's monitoring HEI and, through a benchmarking process, we retrieve useful inputs for the design of social media strategies for HEI.

2016

EduBridge Social Bridging Social Networks and Learning Management Systems

Authors
Oliveira, L; Figueira, A;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 8TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER SUPPORTED EDUCATION, VOL 1 (CSEDU)

Abstract
The exponential growth of social media usage and the integration of digital natives in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have been posing new challenges to both traditional and technology-mediated learning environments. Nowadays social media plays an important, if not central, role in society, for professional and personal purposes. However, it's important to highlight that in the mind of a digital native, social media is not just a tool, it is a place that is as real and as natural as any real-life world place where formal/informal social interactions happen. Still, formal higher education contexts are still mostly imprisoned in locked up institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS), while a new world of social connections grows and develops itself outside schools. One of the main reasons we believe to be persisting in the origin of the matter is the absence of a suitable management, monitoring and analysis tools to legitimize and to efficiently manage the relationship with students in social networks. In this paper we discuss the growing relevance of the "Social Student Relationship Management" concept and introduce the EduBridge Social system, which aims at connecting the most commonly used LMS, Moodle, and the most popular social network, Facebook.

2013

Creating and analysing a social network built from clips of online news

Authors
Figueira, Á; Devezas, J; Cravino, N; Revilla, LF;

Publication
Information Systems and Technology for Organizations in a Networked Society

Abstract
Current online news media are increasingly depending on the participation of readers in their websites while readers increasingly use more sophisticated technology to access online news. In this context, the authors present the Breadcrumbs system and project that aims to provide news readers with tools to collect online news, to create a personal digital library (PDL) of clips taken from news, and to navigate not only on the own PDL, but also on external PDLs that relate to the first one. In this article, the authors present and describe the system and its paradigm for accessing news. We complement the description with the results from several tests which confirm the validity of our approach for clustering of news and for analysing the gathered data.

2017

Detecting Journalistic Relevance on Social Media: A two-case study using automatic surrogate features

Authors
Figueira, A; Guimarães, N;

Publication
Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017, Sydney, Australia, July 31 - August 03, 2017

Abstract
The expansion of social networks has contributed to the propagation of information relevant to general audiences. However, this is small percentage compared to all the data shared in such online platforms, which also includes private/personal information, simple chat messages and the recent called ‘fake news’. In this paper, we make an exploratory analysis on two social networks to extract features that are indicators of relevant information in social network messages. Our goal is to build accurate machine learning models that are capable of detecting what is journalistically relevant. We conducted two experiments on CrowdFlower to build a solid ground truth for the models, by comparing the number of evaluations per post against the number of posts classified. The results show evidence that increasing the number of samples will result in a better performance on the relevancy classification task, even when relaxing in the number of evaluations per post. In addition, results show that there are significant correlations between the relevance of a post and its interest and whether is meaningfully for the majority of people. Finally, we achieve approximately 80% accuracy in the task of relevance detection using a small set of learning algorithms. © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

2017

Journalistic Relevance Classification in Social Network Messages: an Exploratory Approach

Authors
Sandim, M; Fortuna, P; Figueira, A; Oliveira, L;

Publication
COMPLEX NETWORKS & THEIR APPLICATIONS V

Abstract
Social networks are becoming a wide repository of information, some of which may be of interest for general audiences. In this study we investigate which features may be extracted from single posts propagated throughout a social network, and that are indicative of its relevance, from a journalistic perspective. We then test these features with a set of supervised learning algorithms in order to evaluate our hypothesis. The main results indicate that if a text fragment is pointed out as being interesting, meaningful for the majority of people, reliable and with a wide scope, then it is more likely to be considered as relevant. This approach also presents promising results when validated with several well-known learning algorithms.

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