Title: The community structure of a multidimensional network of news clips

Authors: José Luís Devezas; Álvaro Reis Figueira

Addresses: CRACS/INESC TEC, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 1021/1055, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal ' CRACS/INESC TEC, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 1021/1055, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal

Abstract: We analysed the community structure of a network of news clips where relationships were established by the co-reference of entities in pairs of clips. Community detection was applied to a unidimensional version of the news clips network, as well as to a multidimensional version where dimensions were defined based on three different classes of entities: places, people, and dates. The goal was to study the impact on the quality of the identified community structure when using multiple dimensions to model the network. We did a two-fold evaluation, first based on the modularity metric and then based on human input regarding community semantics. We verified that the assessments of the evaluators differed from the results provided by the modularity metric, pointing towards the relevance of the utility and network integration phases in the identification of semantically cohesive groups of news clips.

Keywords: community structure; multidimensional networks; co-reference networks; news clips; community detection; community semantics; social networks; online networks; virtual communities; web based communities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2013.054911

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2013 Vol.9 No.3, pp.411 - 429

Published online: 30 Jan 2014 *

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