Bot prediction on social networks of Twitter in altmetrics using deep graph convolutional networks

Social media bot detection with deep learning methods: a systematic review

Social bots are automated social media accounts governed by software and controlled by humans at the backend. Some bots have good purposes, such as automatically posting information about news and even to provide help during emergencies. Nevertheless, bots have also been used for malicious purposes, such as for posting fake news or rumour spreading or manipulating political campaigns. There are existing mechanisms that allow for detection and removal of malicious bots automatically. However, the bot landscape changes as the bot creators use more sophisticated methods to avoid being detected. Therefore, new mechanisms for discerning between legitimate and bot accounts are much needed. Over the past few years, a few review studies contributed to the social media bot detection research by presenting a comprehensive survey on various detection methods including cutting-edge solutions like machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL) techniques. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one to only highlight the DL techniques and compare the motivation/effectiveness of these techniques among themselves and over other methods, especially the traditional ML ones. We present here a refined taxonomy of the features used in DL studies and details about the associated pre-processing strategies required to make suitable training data for a DL model. We summarize the gaps addressed by the review papers that mentioned about DL/ML studies to provide future directions in this field. Overall, DL techniques turn out to be computation and time efficient techniques for social bot detection with better or compatible performance as traditional ML techniques.

Evaluación de la investigación científica: mejorando las políticas científicas en Latinoamérica

Este artículo busca identificar criterios e indicadores de evaluación científica, que permitan mejorar la forma en que las agencias de financiación, las instituciones académicas y otros grupos evalúan la calidad e impacto de la investigación. Para ello, se realiza una revisión bibliográfica, basada en artículos sobre políticas de evaluación de la investigación científica y agendas internacionales implementadas en los últimos años (principalmente en el Reino Unido, Estados Unidos, Australia, China y Latinoamérica). Los resultados indican que no existe un solo método de evaluación científica, ya que ningún indicador es absoluto. Cada investigación posee actores distintos que deben ser considerados y se debe valorar la investigación en su contexto. Se recomienda un sistema de evaluación mixto, que incorpore criterios cuantitativos y cualitativos, pero que reconozca los límites y alcances de ambos y también de cada disciplina.

DNA-influenced automated behavior detection on twitter through relative entropy

Twitter is a renowned microblogging site that allows users to interact using tweets and it has almost reached 206 million daily active users by the second quarter of 2021. The ratio of Twitter bots has risen in tandem with their popularity. Bot detection is critical for combating misinformation and protecting the credibility of online disclosures. Current bot detection approaches rely on the Twitosphere's topological structure, ignoring the heterogeneity among the profiles. Moreover, most techniques incorporate supervised learning, which depends strongly on large-scale training sets. Therefore, to overcome these issues, we proposed a novel entropy-based framework to detect correlated bots leveraging only user behavior. Specifically, real-time data of users is collected and their online behaviors are modeled as DNA sequences. We then determine the probability distribution of DNA sequences and compute relative entropy to evaluate the distance between the distributions. Accounts with entropy values less than a fixed threshold represent bots. Extensive experiments conducted in real-time Twitter data prove that the proposed detection technique outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with precision = 0.9471, recall = 0.9682, F1 score = 0.9511, and accuracy = 0.9457.

A Survey on the Use of Graph Convolutional Networks for Combating Fake News

The combat against fake news and disinformation is an ongoing, multi-faceted task for researchers in social media and social networks domains, which comprises not only the detection of false facts in published content but also the detection of accountability mechanisms that keep a record of the trustfulness of sources that generate news and, lately, of the networks that deliberately distribute fake information. In the direction of detecting and handling organized disinformation networks, major social media and social networking sites are currently developing strategies and mechanisms to block such attempts. The role of machine learning techniques, especially neural networks, is crucial in this task. The current work focuses on the popular and promising graph representation techniques and performs a survey of the works that employ Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to the task of detecting fake news, fake accounts and rumors that spread in social networks. It also highlights the available benchmark datasets employed in current research for validating the performance of the proposed methods. This work is a comprehensive survey of the use of GCNs in the combat against fake news and aims to be an ideal starting point for future researchers in the field.

A Novel Deep Neural Network-Based Approach to Measure Scholarly Research Dissemination Using Citations Network

We investigated the scientific research dissemination by analyzing the publications and citation data, implying that not all citations are significantly important. Therefore, as alluded to existing state-of-the-art models that employ feature-based techniques to measure the scholarly research dissemination between multiple entities, our model implements the convolutional neural network (CNN) with fastText-based pre-trained embedding vectors, utilizes only the citation context as its input to distinguish between important and non-important citations. Moreover, we speculate using focal-loss and class weight methods to address the inherited class imbalance problems in citation classification datasets. Using a dataset of 10 K annotated citation contexts, we achieved an accuracy of 90.7% along with a 90.6% f1-score, in the case of binary classification. Finally, we present a case study to measure the comprehensiveness of our deployed model on a dataset of 3100 K citations taken from the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus. We employed state-of-the-art graph visualization open-source tool Gephi to analyze the various aspects of citation network graphs, for each respective citation behavior.

Popularity Prediction of Online Contents via Cascade Graph and Temporal Information

Predicting the popularity of online content is an important task for content recommendation, social influence prediction and so on. Recent deep learning models generally utilize graph neural networks to model the complex relationship between information cascade graph and future popularity, and have shown better prediction results compared with traditional methods. However, existing models adopt simple graph pooling strategies, e.g., summation or average, which prone to generate inefficient cascade graph representation and lead to unsatisfactory prediction results. Meanwhile, they often overlook the temporal information in the diffusion process which has been proved to be a salient predictor for popularity prediction. To focus attention on the important users and exclude noises caused by other less relevant users when generating cascade graph representation, we learn the importance coefficient of users and adopt sample mechanism in graph pooling process. In order to capture the temporal features in the diffusion process, we incorporate the inter-infection duration time information into our model by using LSTM neural network. The results show that temporal information rather than cascade graph information is a better predictor for popularity. The experimental results on real datasets show that our model significantly improves the prediction accuracy compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Bot Datasets on Twitter: Analysis and Challenges

The reach and influence of social networks over modern society and its functioning have created new challenges and opportunities to prevent the misuse or tampering of such powerful tools of social interaction. Twitter, a social networking service that specializes in online news and information exchange involving billions of users world-wide, has been infested by bots for several years. In this paper, we analyze both public and private databases from the literature of bot detection on Twitter. We summarize their advantages, disadvantages, and differences, recommending which is more suitable to work with depending on the necessities of the researcher. From this analysis, we present five distinct behaviors in automated accounts exhibited across all the bot datasets analyzed from these databases. We measure their level of presence in each dataset using a radar chart for visual comparison. Finally, we identify four challenges that researchers of bot detection on Twitter have to face when using these databases from the literature.