With the rise of social media, user generated content has become available at an unprecedented scale. These massive collections of user generated content can help better understand billions of individuals. This data also enables novel scientific research in social sciences, anthropology, psychology, and economics at scale. Scientific research demands reproducible and independently verifiable findings. In social media research, scientific findings can be in form of behavioral patterns such as <i>individuals commented on this Facebook post because of its quality.</i> To validate such patterns one can survey the individuals that exhibited the pattern to verify if the patterns truly captured their intentions. This type of validation is known as evaluation with ground truth in data mining. However, social media users are scattered all across the globe. With no face-to-face access to individuals on social media, is it even possible to perform evaluation for social media research? In other words, how can we verify that the user behavioral patterns found are the `true patterns' of these individuals?
@article{reza2015evaluation,
title = {Evaluation without Ground Truth in Social Media Research},
author = {Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu},
year = {2015},
keywords = {journal},
journal = {Communications of the ACM},
month = {jun},
abstract = {With the rise of social media, user generated content has become available at an unprecedented scale. These massive collections of user generated content can help better understand billions of individuals. This data also enables novel scientific research in social sciences, anthropology, psychology, and economics at scale. Scientific research demands reproducible and independently verifiable findings. In social media research, scientific findings can be in form of behavioral patterns such as <i>individuals commented on this Facebook post because of its quality.</i> To validate such patterns one can survey the individuals that exhibited the pattern to verify if the patterns truly captured their intentions. This type of validation is known as evaluation with ground truth in data mining. However, social media users are scattered all across the globe. With no face-to-face access to individuals on social media, is it even possible to perform evaluation for social media research? In other words, how can we verify that the user behavioral patterns found are the `true patterns' of these individuals?},
url = {http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/6/187323-evaluation-without-ground-truth-in-social-media-research},
pdf = {files/SocialMediaEvaluation.pdf},
}