Analysis of spatially oriented topic versatility over time on social media

Abstract

People in different regions or times may have different views and therefore may talk about different sub-topics in a social media. Versatility of a topic in this research refers to the degree to which a topic discussed in a social media covers different points of view or sub-topics. We introduce this notion of versatility for individual topics embedded in Twitter data originated from different regions over time. Uniqueness of a region with respect to a topic is first computed based on how its term distribution differs from those in other regions. Uniqueness values associated with all the regions for a topic are then used to compute its versatility. Since versatility of a topic captures its characteristics across different regions, identifying versatile topics can help understanding regional interests and thus providing region-dependent services. In addition, it becomes possible to identify regions with minority sub-topics, which can be buried easily. By analyzing topic versatility over time, furthermore, we can analyze the behavior of a topic in terms of when it is diverged or converged across the regions.