Twitlang(er): Interactions Modeling Language (and Interpreter) for Twitter

Online social networks are widespread means to enact interactive collaboration among people by, e.g., planning events, diffusing information, and enabling discussions. Twitter provides one of the most illustrative example of how people can effectively interact without resorting to traditional communication media. For example, the platform has acted as a unique medium for reliable communication in emergency or for organising cooperative mass actions. This use of Twitter in a cooperative, possibly critical, setting calls for a more precise awareness of the dynamics regulating message spreading. To this aim, in this paper, we propose Twitlang, a formal language to model interactions among Twitter accounts. The operational semantics associated to the language allows users to clearly and precisely determine the effects of actions performed by Twitter accounts, such as post, retweet, reply-to or delete tweets. The language is implemented in the form of a Maude interpreter, Twitlanger, which takes a language term as an input and, automatically or interactively, explores the computations arising from the term. By relying on this interpreter, automatic verification of communication properties of Twitter accounts can be carried out via the analysis tools provided by the Maude framework. We illustrate the benefits of our executable formalisation by means of few simple, yet typical, examples of Twitter interactions, whose effects are somehow subtle.

[1]  Barbara Poblete,et al.  Twitter under crisis: can we trust what we RT? , 2010, SOMA '10.

[2]  Robin Milner,et al.  A Calculus of Mobile Processes, II , 1992, Inf. Comput..

[3]  Alberto Verdejo,et al.  Implementing CCS in Maude 2 , 2002, Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci..

[4]  Matteo Magnani,et al.  The ML-Model for Multi-layer Social Networks , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining.

[5]  Jimmy J. Lin,et al.  Information network or social network?: the structure of the twitter follow graph , 2014, WWW.

[6]  Chao Yang,et al.  Empirical Evaluation and New Design for Fighting Evolving Twitter Spammers , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[7]  Qi Gao,et al.  Analyzing user modeling on twitter for personalized news recommendations , 2011, UMAP'11.

[8]  Rocco De Nicola,et al.  A Formal Approach to Autonomic Systems Programming: The SCEL Language , 2014, TAAS.

[9]  Geert-Jan Houben,et al.  Twitcident: fighting fire with information from social web streams , 2012, WWW.

[10]  Patrick Paroubek,et al.  Twitter as a Corpus for Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining , 2010, LREC.

[11]  Gianluca Stringhini,et al.  Detecting spammers on social networks , 2010, ACSAC '10.

[12]  Johan Bollen,et al.  Modeling Public Mood and Emotion: Twitter Sentiment and Socio-Economic Phenomena , 2009, ICWSM.

[13]  Matteo Magnani,et al.  Conversation Practices and Network Structure in Twitter , 2012, ICWSM.

[14]  Robin Milner,et al.  A Calculus of Mobile Processes, II , 1992, Inf. Comput..

[15]  ROBIN MILNER,et al.  Edinburgh Research Explorer A Calculus of Mobile Processes, I , 2003 .

[16]  Alan Ritter,et al.  Unsupervised Modeling of Twitter Conversations , 2010, NAACL.

[17]  Brian D. Davison,et al.  Empirical study of topic modeling in Twitter , 2010, SOMA '10.

[18]  Rocco De Nicola,et al.  KLAIM: A Kernel Language for Agents Interaction and Mobility , 1998, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[19]  Gordon D. Plotkin,et al.  A structural approach to operational semantics , 2004, J. Log. Algebraic Methods Program..

[20]  Peter Mika,et al.  Making Sense of Twitter , 2010, SEMWEB.

[21]  Robin Milner,et al.  Communication and concurrency , 1989, PHI Series in computer science.

[22]  Roberto Di Pietro,et al.  A Criticism to Society (As Seen by Twitter Analytics) , 2014, 2014 IEEE 34th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW).

[23]  Alessandro Vespignani,et al.  Modeling Users' Activity on Twitter Networks: Validation of Dunbar's Number , 2011, PloS one.

[24]  Narciso Martí-Oliet,et al.  All About Maude - A High-Performance Logical Framework, How to Specify, Program and Verify Systems in Rewriting Logic , 2007, All About Maude.