SGER: Algorithms and Software Tools for Discovering Coalitions and Identifying Leaders in the Blogosphere

现代通讯手段，如网络日志、聊天室和电子邮件，为大量的人提供了前所未有的机会来表达他们的观点，并与其他人进行交流，其中大多数人并不是个人熟人。2005年8月26日，《华尔街日报》刊登了丹尼尔·亨宁格的文章，“相当多的人取代了越南的'沉默的大多数'。“他写道：“。. .理查德尼克松。. .在1969年发表了著名的演讲. . .当然，这个想法是，反战运动所引起的日常关注缺少了一类坐在家里对抗议者的行为感到愤怒的美国人。今天，因为互联网，没有人必须在沉默中沸腾，正如两党的有线活动家在2004年的高科技选举中证明的那样，现在也是如此。但可能是目前对反布什、反伊拉克情绪的迷恋再次错过了新闻表面下流动的政治潮流，就像媒体错过的那样。. . 2004年大选中的价值选民。“我们这个时代的政治和社会现实包括一个巨大的交流空间，即“电子社会”，它使越来越多的人能够表达自己的意见，积极参与一般社会的社会生活。人们预期，自我表达和交流方式的急剧增加将加强社会趋势的形成和演变过程。电子空间是如此之大，以至于它需要复杂的计算机算法来解决重要的问题并进行有意义的分析。在任何社交网络中，链接都是在永无止境的动态中形成和断开的，这代表了社交网络的演变。随着网络的发展，社会团体形成并发展，偶尔一个社会团体可能会发展到足以代表一个新的运动或联盟的规模。本研究的目的是追踪和发现博客圈中形成和发展的联盟。虽然从技术上来说，追踪电子社会中某个特定行动者的发展是很容易的，但要发现由持有“合理”接近但不完全相同的观点的行动者组成的群体，并将他们与那些持有实质性不同观点的人区分开来，则要重要得多，也困难得多。除了需要处理的大量数据外，研究人员还必须意识到这些群体的波动性，其成员可能在某些问题上达成一致，而在其他问题上存在分歧。直接发现和描述这些群体的尝试可能涉及列出参与者的主题和立场。这种方法实际上是不可能的，不仅因为阅读（人类）出版物所需的时间，而且还因为定性的困难：许多细微差别和微妙之处可能看起来矛盾和不一致。使用自动化系统进行阅读也是不切实际的，因为它还需要对每篇文章进行大量的语言分析。

Modern means of communication, such as web-logs, chatrooms, and e-mail messaging, provide unprecedented opportunities for a vast number of people to express their opinions and communicate with other people, most of whom are not personal acquaintances.On August 26, 2005, TheWall Street Journal published an article by Daniel Henninger, "A Quite Majority Replaces Vietnam's 'Silent Majority'." He writes: ". . . Richard Nixon . . . gave a famous speech in 1969. . . . The idea, of course, was that the daily attention commanded by the anti-war movement was missing a class of Americans who sat home seething at the behavior of protesters. Today, because of the Internet, no one has to seethe in silence, as wired activists in both parties proved in 2004's high-tech elections, and now. But it may be that the current infatuation with anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment is again missing a political current flowing beneath the surface of the news, just as the media missed . . . the value voters in the 2004 election."The political and social reality of our time includes a huge communication space, "the electronic society," which allows an ever growing number of people to express themselves and actively participate in the social life of the general society. It is expected that drastically increased ways of self-expression and communication should intensify the processes of forming and evolving social trends. The electronic space is so large that it demands sophisticated computer algorithms in order to address important questions and do meaningful analysis.In any social network, links are formed and broken in a never ending dynamics that represents the evolution of the social network. As the network evolves, social groups form and evolve, and occasionally a social group may grow to a size large enough to represent a new movement or coalition. The goal of this research is to track and discover such coalitions as they form and evolve in the Blogosphere.While technically it is easy to track the evolution of one particular actor of an electronic society, it is much more important and much more difficult to discover groups composed of actors that are holding "reasonably" close although not identical opinions, and to differentiate them from those with substantially different opinions. In addition to the immense amount of data to be processed, the researcher must be aware of the volatility of such groups, whose members may agree on some issues, and disagree on others.The straightforward attempt to discover and characterize these groups might involve listing out topics and positions of the actors. This approach is practically impossible not only because of the time necessary to read (by humans) the publications, but also because of the difficulty in characterization: many nuances and subtleties may look contradictory and inconsistent. Using an automated system for reading would not be practical either as it would also require a substantial linguistic analysis of each article.